Affiliate Marketing Rules

Affiliate Marketing Rules

Top Affiliate Marketing Rules

So you have been wanting to get into affiliate marketing, and want to know the rules. You have your website and or blog all set up and ready to go. You have chosen your niche and market that you want to promote and make money off of. You just need links to start making money. Promoting other’s services and products is not something that is difficult to do. However, you will find that with all of the many companies that offer affiliate programs, and referral options, they all have their own rules that you must follow.

Affiliate marketing is pretty easy to follow, that is unless you have many different programs that you are a part of. When you start getting so many that you cannot remember the rules, or the guidelines that you have to follow, you might have a problem. This is because the rules for affiliate programs are as different as the companies. Each company is allowed to make their own rules. However, you might see many similarities. That does not mean that they are copying one another, or cloning their affiliate program so to speak, but yet it means that they have the same rules.

Affiliate marketing rules can be so very different. They can range from not mentioning the brand names that they sell anywhere on your website, to not have that particular market in your website URL. Because they are so different for each program and company that you promote, you are going to have to be sure that you read each one well and make sure that you understand it fully. If you all ready have your URL for your website, you may not be able to participate in some of the affiliate programs. This is because you will not meet the requirements for the rules.

Another rule that you are going to see often when you are into affiliate marketing is the page rank rule. Some of the companies that will allow you to promote their services or products will not want you to have a higher page rank than they do. Nor will they allow you to have a website that is higher in the search engine rankings. For example, if you were promoting coffee, and you wanted to become an affiliate for Folgers coffee. Your website would not be able to come up above the official Folgers coffee website in the search engine results when coffee, or Folgers coffee is used as the search term. The companies that have this rule in place for their affiliate marketing programs feel  as if your website were higher than theirs for the product that they are selling, that it would hurt their business tremendously. And, it just might. They would rather have the straight sales any day, than the commissioned sales. Who wouldn’t?

Keeping a spreadsheet of the affiliate marketing programs that you are a part of and their rules is a great idea. This way you are never confused and know just where you need to stand to be a part of that program. This is the best thing that you can do for your affiliate marketing business. Not only that, you will also find that some of the sites that have broken rules and have been caught have resulted in law suits. Cover your tracks and make sure that you are following the rules that are set by that company for the best results.

You will also find that there is a thing that is called affiliate marketing software. If you can find a program that fits your needs and will help you keep everything straight, you may not have to worry about keeping track of them yourself. Use your software to keep track and make sure that you are doing your affiliate marketing the right way. Your efforts will pay off eventually, and you will be glad that you went by the book and followed the necessary affiliate marketing rules.

Tips on How to Use the Power of YouTube to Build Traffic

By Tom Denton

If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time or even if you’re a complete newbie you should know the importance of traffic to your business. You may also know that it’s not the wisest thing to “buy” traffic, because once the money runs out, so will the traffic. So how do you get traffic that is so integral to your business? Traffic that’s continuous and best of all free? YouTube can help you with this.

YouTube offers many opportunities for promotion and getting traffic to your site as it has the power to increase your rankings considerably. Just take a look at any Google page and you’ll notice that most times the videos are usually ranked at the top of the page.  Here’s why. One, YouTube is owned by Google and they work together. Two, YouTube is the second largest search engine next only to Google. That should be enough motivation to make you want go and create your own YouTube channel and upload videos to it.

But don’t go rushing off to create just yet. Let’s make sure you’re doing this the right way first so you don’t waste your time. Take note of these tips:

Make your profile interesting

YouTube is just like any other social site. So you want to create an interesting profile for networking purposes. People will want to know more about you if they like your videos. This can help build trust among your audience, thus giving you greater traffic. Try to make your profile interesting enough to get across to everyone. Professionally it shouldn’t be too boring or too stuffy. But informally it shouldn’t be too hyped either.

Promote your videos

You won’t get much traffic without viewers. You can’t just post your videos and expect that viewers will automatically find them no matter how good you think they are. You have to promote them. You can put them on your blog or on any of your other social sites.

Use your keyword in the title of your videos

People find your videos when they do searches via the search engines and on Youtube so you should make it as easy as possible for them to find you. I mean you do want to get traffic right? Okay, you should include your major keyword or keyword phrase in the title and in the description. Don’t just put it there though, it should feel natural and make sense.  And don’t forget to put them in the tags either.

 Know when to post your videos

On the internet timing is everything, you need to know when to do what. So with YouTube it’s no different, it has its peak and off-peak times for traffic. Thursday mornings or early afternoons US time is considered the best day and time to post a video of general interest. Wednesdays is said to be another good day. You need to pay attention to the loading times of your videos as well. Start early for those with internet connectivity issues and for large videos if you want them uploaded in the prime time slots.

There’s approximately an hour of video being uploaded to YouTube every second.  This makes it a valuable resource to drive traffic to your site and promote it. However despite the obvious competition, if you consistently produce quality videos with time you’ll reap the benefits of your effort which is to build traffic.

Tom Denton invites you to check out http://seo-ninja.net/ – where you’ll get more solutions to your SEO problems, delivered in an easy step-by-step action guide.