Every so often even I have to admit to the genius, and down right evilness, of some affiliate marketing technniques. And this one has really got me in awe of the guys who do it – they should get a gold medal for the concept and a smack in the head for implementing it. Using some Yahoo! technology you too can hijack the brand listings of a merchant and make sure that every time someone searches for their brand and clicks the natural result it counts as an affiliate click and as a result an affiliate sale.

I was reading through the terms and conditions of some affiliate programs the other night. During this I noticed that if you’re an affiliate on the H Samuel or Ernest Jones programs you’re not supposed to be targeting misspellings of the brands . Why strong highstreet brands such as H Samuel and Ernest Jones should really have to worry about aspect of their brand online is beyond me. If you’re an affiliate you shouldn’t be attempting to rank for phrases such as:

• H Smauel
• H Samuels
• H Samul
• H Samel
• Ernst Jones
• Ernet Jonew
• Enrest Jonew

But god I wish I could

Over the last couple of months a couple of clients, or their internal representatives known as account managers, have been saying things that get on my nerves. Some of these have kinda got to me. Its got the stage where I’ve been wishing I could just say this or just say that to them. In an attempt to awaken them from inaction, torpor of just crass stupidity

I love doing real conversion focussed copywriting. Its one of my small pleasures. Was one of the biggest eye openers when I moved away from writing copy to drive traffic through natural search to writing copy to drive traffic that also converts. The first day that someone started talking about financial targets for a website just about had me running a mile – they wanted to make money not positions! One of the biggest choices you have to make is for the psychological make up of the product/service you are to rank/sell online.

Web traffic analysis is a good place to start understanding how your website is being discovered and used. It will tell you where your website traffic is coming from and what it does when it reaches your website. Getting the correct analytics package, the software that gives you the statistics which you analyse, for your web site is the first step on the path to understanding your web site traffic.

Affiliate marketing is a simple concept. The affiliate gets clicks to a merchants website. If these clicks convert to a sale within a predetermined time frame a commission is paid by the merchant to the affiliate. Often the merchant will employ an agency, a network or both to act as an intermediary between them and the affiliates and manage their campaign. Agencies and networks are paid by either a flat fee or a commission per sale. Under the commission set up it can be in the network or affiliates best interests to overlook breaches of terms and conditions – as they make more money. I’m not saying all do and I’m not saying how widespread it is (I don’t know) but when money is at stake there is always someone willing to bend the rules.

OK the first stage on any Internet Marketing strategy – and don’t leave this up to your agency – is to know what you want to achieve. Before you know what you want you need to know what you have – you need to know where you are before you can plan how to get to somewhere. And in Internet Marketing knowing how to guage the performance of your campaign(s) is centrally important.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows us all to exchange information easily. You and I can exchange emails, we can surf the web, have discussions in forums, argue in blogs and chat in real time over messenger services. With this right their is a responsibility – understand that everything becomes public almost anything you say or do can, and may well, become public property. Once you put something online it becomes viral, it can spin out of control and once you lose control of your information its hard to recover from this position without damaging your position online in some quarters – someone will be offended by the way you try to limit their access and use of this information.