Affiliate marketing appeals to a lot of people for various reasons. However, I believe that a lot of newbie affiliate marketers simply fail because they feed into the hype that you can just build a site really quickly, and magically the traffic is going to come pouring in. Not to mention that there are a million get rich schemes out there that seem to promise the world.
I wanted to take the time to clear up some misconceptions that you might hear from day to day on affiliate marketing. Also, I wanted to clarify that you are not going to become a millionaire without lifting a finger, affiliate marketing takes A LOT of work.
NoFollow Tags – Big Misconception
There seems to be a big buzz about DoFollow tags these days. I recently listened to a very successful Internet marketer Justine Brooke that really helped clear this dreaded DoFollow misconception up for me. Typically, you are taught to blog comment on niches that are related to you, however, 7 out 10 people will tell you to look for DoFollow tags on blogs.
They seem to think that other blogs carry no weight. Well this couldn’t be any further from the truth. That was really a tactic set up by Google to help stop the spammers that were putting their keywords in the name field with a URL linked backed to them. However, Google is the only one that abides by these.
You will get credit for them in the end, because many sites are indexed on Yahoo and Bing. I guess what I am trying to say is that affiliates get so caught up in DoFollow tags. Do not just go around and drop links on other blogs, you need to be respectful of others blogs. Add some value, and maybe every once in while if it is necessary leave a link to help people. So this brings me to my next subject, “content is king.”
Content Is King – So What
What does this mean? I am sure if you are an affiliate marketer you have heard this a million times. However, what does content is king actually mean. Well, for starters you can’t just focus on creating websites that are focused on SERPS because while that might be great for the search engine, users will eventually catch on and stop reading your content.
You have to talk about stuff that has some value to your audience. No one wants to read the same washed up information over and over again. So bear in mind, make your writing interesting and don’t put so much emphasis on writing for the SERPS. You will want to use strong, emphases, and underline tags, but just don’t go crazy with it.
So all in all make sure you are adding value to your articles, blog post, ect. Do not just write for the search engines, and most importantly don’t over stuff your content with your keywords. As a good rule of thumb I would keep your keyword density to below 3%. If you follow this advice for the misconception of the DoFollow tags, and content rules you should be fine in the affiliate marketing world. What other advice would you guys at buildthatlist.com feel are necessary for any affiliate marketer to understand?
This article is a guest post from Garen Arnold who owns the best web hosting service. Garen is a freelance web site designer, and also runs a site that allows people to report online scams to help keep the Internet safe.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! All comments are Do-Follow, KeywordLuv and CommentLuv!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Nothing is easy these days, specially blogging as an affiliate!
I know that Content is KING! and trying to enhance my blogs all the time, but you know! I still don’t know what’s the good content, I am keeping wondering,
Hesham @ FamousBloggers´s last blog ..Scribe SEO content became the official SEO plugin for FB Guest Blogging Contest
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 2:56 am
Yeah, I know what you mean blogging for an affiliate is not easy. Especially when you are in the web hosting review field like I am. I would say it has to be one of the hardest niches aside from weight loss. What do you think?
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
I’ve actually started to delete comments even though they’re legitimate per se, if it’s one of those “nice post” blogs with just a keyword as the author name, it won’t cut it on my blog (Especially when I have keywordluv on my blog.)
Jack@Online Marketing Blog´s last blog ..7 Blogging Mistakes You Can Avoid Right Now!
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 2:58 am
lol. I get np which I think means nice post or no problem. If they can’t even leave two full words I am sorry but it will not stay on my blog. Of course they link drop too.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
I think the grammar for this article is horrible and you should be working on it.
“I am sure if you are affiliate marketer you have heard this a million times. ”
Shabbir´s last blog ..How to Build your Individual Brand
[Reply]
BrianJUY Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Shabbir….
Seriously? I can’t believe you have the audacity to make a comment like this…
When you insult a person’s writing and you are a writer, your writing had better be DAMN GOOD…
I just looked at your blog… and this I can tell you without batting an eye… Your writing is horrible; if I were you I’d be embarrassed.
Since you felt like you had to publicly berate Garren, I’m going to put you on the spot. Let’s look at the 1st sentence in your most recent blog post: How to Build your Individual Brand…
“Building brand is always best for any business but many individuals think that brand is something that is related to companies but actually it does not matter if you are an individual or a company and you as an individual also can brand yourself.”
Have you ever heard the term “run-on sentence?” Do you know what a “comma” or “semicolon” is? Do you know what an “adjective” is? You should really look these up and start using them.
If you can’t figure out what’s wrong with your sentence, you have no place blasting anyone on their grammar.
Garren simply left out the word “an.” A simple mistake… Your opening sentence shows your ignorance of the English language. The rest of your post makes my eyes bleed.
When you point your finger at someone there are three pointing back at you.
BTW… I think my blog post for today would greatly benefit you. If I were you I’d bookmark it and refer to it frequently… If you’re not willing to do that, you should probably stick to programming.
BrianJUY´s last blog ..12 Common Grammar Mistakes
[Reply]
Thanks for sharing this. There is a lot of buzz around at the minute and your points reinforce what everyone one should be doing anyway. Make useful comments on as many blogs as possible in your niche and your efforts will be rewarded over time. This is not an overnight success, as you say.
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 3:48 am
I have been doing SEO for 3 years and know first hand that I don’t know squat. I am still learning every single day though. It makes me sick seeing all these make 1000000 overnight sites.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
I really think the big search engines needs to agree on the “nofollow”-tag so webmasters will know to use it or not. Optimizing only to Google on that matter is probably not a good idea in the long run.
Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Comment Spam, She’s Back: Dr. Ann Voisin From Linda Christas College
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Since Google is the big player in the search engine game we have to follow their rules. But, from what I have heard Bing is really on the rise. Search engines are always changing, but we just have to know how to adjust to them.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
Garen,
I’ll second what Matthew has said.
Nofollow, dofollow, content, backlinks etc. I sometimes feel like I’m drowning in an alien language. I’m very new to blogging and I’m learning everyday from other bloggers both novice and experienced. I am very grateful for posts such as this, thank you.
Is my grammar okay? tee hee
Regards
Paul
Paul´s last blog ..A place for everything and everything in its place
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Hey Paul,
Honestly, I have found that not getting so caught up on them is the best thing you can do. Making comments and adding value is the point of blog commenting. Chances are the blogs you are commenting on are going to get indexed in Yahoo or Bing. Even better you will get credit for them, but to only comment on DoFollow blogs is just insane.
Case and point, if I had a blog comment that brought me 100 hits a month and 50 subscribers, but came from a nofollow link is that worthless. The links show up as direct hits, if I am not mistaken, too.
Hope my grammar was alright in that one….lol.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
Paul Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Garen,
Grammar checked and okay.
I wouldn’t know a Dofollow from a Nofollow blog if i walked into it. I just love blogging, writing posts and commenting; it’s all great fun. I’m am planning to monetise my blog eventually but I’m just working round to that. A bit more skill building before that happens; I’ve building a list of great bloggers who can help me on that side when the time comes.
Regards
Paul
Paul´s last blog ..A place for everything and everything in its place
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 4:22 am
Hey Paul,
There is a ton of hype on these tags. Even on some forums like the Warrior Forum people will sell list for dofollow blogs. That defeats the whole purpose of blogging. You are not supposed to just go around and drop links. I know it has to really annoy a lot of blog owners. That and it takes the whole networking aspect out of blogging. There are some great resources for building list on Tom’s blog here
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
Slowly, I begin to get some sense of what to do and what is working for me. What I can understand is content and comments. I hope that I can learn more over time.
[Reply]
Nofollow no more works as before.
Agent Deepak´s last blog ..Interview with James Richmond – The InfoPreneur
[Reply]
This is a great post, especially for beginners. The NoFollow debate is as hot as ever these days, and I’ve got a crazy suspicion (call me a conspiracy theorist) that even Google itself still gives credit for NoFollow links. Maybe not as much, but credit none the less.
And I totally agree that content is king. I’ve personally ran a few clandestine experiments and my sites with killer content (and lots of it) totally blew the jankily-written sites out of the Google water, even though I promoted them both the same way, and set them up to compete for the same keywords.
Lee@Search Engine Viking´s last blog ..Success: The Unofficial Tomato Soup SEO Challenge
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 4:27 am
I am fully with you. Don’t worry about the noFollows because they really mislead people. I listened to an interview by Justin Brooke which was a course “Building Social Equity 2.0″ but he explains it to a teet. I don’t have the access to file since it is member based, but it really changed the whole way I looked at blogging.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
Lee from Search Engine Viking Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
I’d love to listen to that, if you find it
Sounds like he’s reached the same conclusions that I have. Thanks again for a great post.
Lee@Search Engine Viking´s last blog ..Alexa 3,598,486 And Counting
[Reply]
Your post has sparked a thought Garen.
Let’s ask the question: What is a blog and what was its original purpose? Ans: To encourage discussion, educate and enable the sharing of thoughts and ideas. I really dislike the get rich quick stuff. Personally, I think its just low, not to say I don’t want to get rich, but blogging is losing its purpose for many as they see it as just a way to make money.
I may be going ahead of everything, but when you think about it, the do-follow stuff really doesn’t add value to the blogging community as a whole, it was created to get better rankings and results from google. So even if I get 1000 visitors from a do-follow site, if my content is crappy then what’s the point. I think google should just treat all comments as do-follow because pretty soon most sites will have the do-follow feature anyway.
No one will buy anything from a site that has crappy content. So content is and will always be king. In the long term, affiliate marketing will work best for sites that have the king content – Like this one
P.S. – Sorry about the long comment, I have a big mouth
Robyn-Dale@Sam’s Web Guide – Web Tutorials & Tech News´s last blog ..Top 30 Massive Earning Blogs – Its Time To Take Action
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 4:37 am
I almost want to do a case study just to prove my point. I am 110% sure it is correct. Writing quality content is always going to get noticed. In fact, if your content is pure junk it might be up in the SERPS if you find a way to trick it. Realistically it won’t stay up there, though. I have seen this a million times before. In fact, lets say you “keyword stuff you site”, but tricked the search engines to find your site. Well, someone is going to get mad and report it to Google as keywords stuffing, and guess what now your “dofollow” links carry absolutely no weight at all.
I wouldn’t be surprised is someday people start getting banned for comment spam commenting. Maybe, they already have.
I really wish Google would have never come up with these links…lol.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
Wow! I go away for the day and this is what I come back too.
Thank you Garen for your great guest post which has sparked a lot of discussion, and thank you for taking the time to reply to all their comments – because here I was thinking I would have to come back and reply to them all and you had already done it.
@Sam – I understand where you are coming from. You should be writing and commenting to add value, but I also think that Do-Follow does have it’s place in it all. If all Do-Follow does is get people visiting your site to add a comment eventually they will have visited enough to get a good overview of your writing quality that hopefully they will continue to come back to comment but will also stay because of your content!
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 5:43 am
lol, no problem Tom. Thanks for giving me the pleasure to participate on your blog
. I don’t own any blogs on SEO or affiliate marketing so I really don’t ever get to share any of my knowledge on it. You or anyone that would like to participate as a guest on any of my blogs are always welcome to guest post 
. I guess scams relate to every single niche you could possibly imagine. People are really passionate about being conned out of money too. I love getting emails thanking me for saving them so much trouble. It is worth anymore money in the world to get praises like that 
.
My reporting scam site is blowing up now
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
Garen -
I’m with Paul on this topic. I love blogging and try to produce interesting and fresh content. I like to read what other people are producing and to try and add some value in my comments. I think that building relationships with other bloggers and writing fresh content is a great way to start. At some point i may have to look into some more hi-tech approaches to finding my audience and I think this site will help with that. Thanks for a great post – going to stop before I commit any more grammatical errors.
Phil
Phil – Less Ordinary Lliving´s last blog ..How to Start
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 5:48 am
Blogging is so powerful if used correctly
. A good place to get fresh content is from Google Alerts. Also, I follow a lot of news sites and check for articles that relate to my niche. I have heard that Google is giving extra kudos to breaking news so just keep that in the back of your mind when writing fresh content for your blogs.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Best WordPress Blog Plugins – Plug It In, Plug It in
[Reply]
Commenting on dofollow blogs without adding any value is pretty much useless. All it takes is a flick of a switch to turn a dofollow blog back into into a nofollow blog.
I have seen dofollow bloggers doing this as they get fed up with spam like comments.
Aaron from TechThinker.com´s last blog ..How to Choose a Good Twitter Username
[Reply]
Much too often have I seen people over doing this. Either written for the search engines or simple comments like ‘ great article’ so that they get noticed. Well, I guess they don’t realize it’s making them infamous!
I would much rather get attention for the value I add. This will build my reputation as an expert. And, after all, it’s somebody elses’s space. Be wise enough to respect it.
[Reply]
I prefer dofollow but there are various benefits of nofollow comments – interacting with a blogger/community, potential links from the blog owner, traffic and so on. When looking for blogs to comment on, I didn’t really search out dofollow – although most of them have them which is a bonus.
Jason @ Make Money At Home´s last blog ..A Preview Of The New Design And Site Updates
[Reply]
There is actually not much of a difference between do and no follow blogs these days, also getting fresh contents from Google alerts is fine but there are lot of other sites which are doing well in this field. So I feel titles should be made and broken in such a way that it should get people from Google organic search. Correct me if I am wrong buddy.
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Yes that sounds right. It all got blown way out of proportion, and it was basically a tactic the Google used to help reduce spam. There is an ton of spam that goes on. Google alerts are a great way to find good blogs to participate on, but I also use Digg, Technorati, and Stumbleupon to find blog post to comment on, too. However, one of the most powerful ways to get good results with blog commenting is by commenting on blogs that your competitors have gotten backlinks from.
[Reply]
Heck, I don’t even care about SEO and keyword density.
Give your reader the most info-taining x-perience possible, and if the audience connects with it, the content gets promoted (twitter etc.) and you’ll start ruling your part of the web.
Make people love you, and google will love you, too
Mars Dorian´s last blog ..Whatever you think, think the opposite
[Reply]
Garen from best web hosting service Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
The only time I care about keyword density is on authority sites linking back to me. On my blogs and sites I will use my keywords a couple times, in the title of course but not overly concerned with it. Good content will get discovered one way or another.
Garen @ best web hosting service´s last blog ..Sitemeter vs Google Analytics – Got Sitetracking
[Reply]
Garren,
i don’t really bother about dofollow or nofollow..when i love a post and i can contribute i do so.the most that can happen is the temptation to post comments more on blogs with blogger luv plugin,after that nothing else.
i know that i am building backlinks and traffic ..that’s it..this may be good or bad but that’s what i do.
what do you think?
mk akan´s last blog ..Does Blogging Affect Your Health?
[Reply]
Humm, this may be enlightening and don’t hear often. Thanks for good information.
[Reply]