If you’re going to read one of my posts this year, this is probably the one to read and if you like it, feel free to share it.  Most of you that are advanced know this, but I am hoping you’ll chime in and give your own advice in the comments section. I’m also going to share some ideas on how to move into new channels and improve on existing ones.

The other week someone scraped an old site of mine that is content based.  They placed everything onto a new url and changed out the Affiliate links for their own.  Although I could care less that they scraped the site because they are not currently and will not outrank me since site has authority, is definitely the owner of the content and they screwed up the design because they did not scrape correctly.  What they did do that had a negative effect on me was not change out the adsense javascript with my id in it.  I was immediately removed from adsense because the scrapers placed links to porn sites and adult dating sites on their pages and in the copy.  So I did what most people would think to do, I wrote to adsense.

In pure adsense form, they never wrote back to me, never helped me and I got no support.  I am also still blocked from running ads.  If I was an Affiliate in the Google Network with links up, I would now have to change them all out since the only way to get paid is through Adsense.  Although I actually do like the Google Affiliate Network, I never had time to add links to my site from it so I actually lucked out with that one an saved time.  Luckily for me I diversified my income channels and adsense was not a large part of it.   This got me thinking and made me want to write this post.

My advice to you is to consider every form of traffic and if you rely on something, move on and find 2 more things that work to drive revenue.  That way if the main source runs out or you get cut off, you have at least one or two more revenue and traffic streams to rely on. 

In this post I am going to go to through a few channels and ways to generate traffic and some of the bad about each and why you may want to avoid them for either ecommerce or Affiliate sites.  The importance of this post is so that you can learn how to diversify your traffic and revenue for ecommerce stores as well as Affiliate sites.

Affiliate Marketing:

Ecommerce Sites – The Affiliate Channel is one of my favorites.  It is cost effective because you are only paying when a sale is made.  It can start out by bringing new stores who don’t have their own traffic customers and sales with a value add from bloggers, etc… but there is a down side.  Unfortunately when you do have traffic, trademark bidders, sites that show up for your store + coupon or coupon codes, etc… will begin to poach sales from you.  From my experience, 99.9% of the time this is bad and one of the reasons why many programs close.  They get adware, shopping carts poached by coupon sites, etc… in them which many smart merchants feel is stealing, and all of the sudden you realize that your profits are gone so you close your program.  If you are an Affiliate and this merchant was a huge part of your income, you are now going to have to try to replace them.

The next issue is that your competitors think that offering higher commissions, longer cookie lives, etc… will give them the ability to compete with you and take your content and value adding Affiliates away.  Competing with their commissions, etc… unfortunately reduces your margin and if you are not a customer acquisition program, but are one that is going for profit on sales, it no longer makes sense to run your program, especially if margins are further reduced from coupon codes being used and commissions and network fees being paid out.  What I have been trying to do with my clients is to set up a very low percentage, but give the Affiliate a recurring commissions for life.  This way merchants can now have a ton of information to help other channels like media buying learn where to advertise.  It also lets you know how profitable you are on the sale, how long the life of the customer is from that type of traffic and your Affiliate has reliable income streams coming in which makes them happy.

Because you know that Affiliate site type A has a 6 month customer life and type b has almost a year’s worth of life, now you can also adjust your marketing to buy media in these spaces that have volume and you can assume the buys will yield long customer lives making the buys more profitable because of the life of the customer.  This also work with PPC, etc… If the cost per conversion is high, but you know the person is going to stay around, you can eat the cost of the high cpa knowing that the average life of the customer will be profitable in the third or fourth month.

Affiliate Marketing is an amazing channel and one that I love and promote, unfortunately many companies just don’t get it and rely on poor advice they are fed, or don’t want to listen to the benefits of a value adding program vs. the short sale or non lifetime value of your Affiliate and Customer.

Affiliate Sites -  If your biggest money earning program closes, you now have a ton of issues.  You have to find a new merchant and have to hope they pay out on time or at all.  You have to research if their program is legit and your traffic will convert as well as it did with the one that closed and that their customer service will treat your visitors well so they trust your recommendations.  What I recommend to you is to make an exact copy of your webpages with that Merchant’s links and store the code.  Now try to go in house with them if you trust them to pay you.  If that doesn’t work, as them to do a private invite only program for relevant content sites that don’t rank for their trademarks and modifiers like store name + coupon codes if that’s the reason they closed.  If that doesn’t work, go to their competitors and look for similar pricing, colors, shopping paths and customer service.  Then do a simple find a replace from the code to switch out your links quickly while keeping a copy of your original code, in case something goes wrong, so you have a template that works.

The next thing you should do is research what a CPC would be on that page and look up how many clicks you got.  You can then replace all of your Affiliate Banners and links with channels that payout on a click basis and still be profitable.  You may also want to list the page or site and sell media space instead.  Since you know how many sales it can drive because of the Affiliate links, advertisers will be more inclined to spend on your site.  This also helps to diversify your income so that if a Merchant pulls their program you still have money coming in.

SEO:

ecommerce sites and Affiliate sites – Never rely on SEO.  Search Engines are a business and will do what makes them the most money while providing the most relevant results to their end users.  It still amazes me how many companies rely on SEO for their sales without realizing they could lose everything if an algorithm change hits them negatively.  What you need to do is think of other ways to drive traffic into your site.

If you have money, try Media Buys and PPC.  If you don’t have money to test with media and PPC, test Social Media for traffic that converts while you have SEO traffic coming in.  Use social media share buttons and make sure you have a newsletter sign up somewhere for them to join your site and so you can remarket back to them again.  You can also try creating a membership and benefits portal.

Not only will you be able to rely on your visitors to send you new customers, but if your SEO dies, you still have traffic and ways to generate revenue until you can build your rankings back up.  Another great method that I always use is to go out and find partner sites to do cross promotions with.  It helps you build a fan base or customer base fast and they are relevant to you.  Not to mention you also make friends with sites that are in your niche and you can both help each other.

PPC:

ecommerce sites and Affiliate sites – PPC is always getting more expensive, that is why I did this post on how to use the Google display network to try and get your CPA back down by using it as a media buy and to drive sales when your PPC keywords and phrases are no longer profitable….btw, if you would do the recurring commissions in your Affiliate program and you know what terms drive traffic to that page, although the first sale may not be profitable for you, you have an idea of how long the customer stays with you and you can now keep those terms knowing you should be profitable on the third or fourth purchase.  It’s important to remember that as competition comes into your niche or as you change links, destination pages, ads, etc… your costs go up (sometimes only temporarily) and PPC may no longer be affordable for you.  That is why you need a value adding Affiliate Program, strong SEO, good partnerships, A newsletter and other channels to rely on when PPC becomes to expensive.

Newsletters:

Your newsletter list is your gold mine.  It is your customers and people who are interested in your products.  Unfortunately you may hire someone that abuses that list and it no longer works.  Now what do you do?  You can’t get delivery and you cannot get them to open their emails.  This is when you start thinking about ways to get a new list built.  Think of social media sites to drive new sign ups.  Think about your membership section.  Build a blog and try to get a following on it as well as try to get an apology message out, while staying CANSPAM compliant.  It is important to keep track of who opts out, when and why they opt out and keep a record of the reasons.  You may find that certain promotions or words you used end up driving people away instead of driving sales.  You can also start using Video Marketing with tools like Viewbix to help gather new customers to opt in and sign up.

Building Relationships: 

ecommerce sites and Affiliates – Relationships are a great way to grow your reader and customer base.  They build trust and loyalty for your site because your new audience is being referred from a trusted source and you can build your brand better.  If those people like your products, then all of the sudden you can get referrals from them.  You can build relationships through guest blogging, cross promoting with stores that have similar products, cross promote on email and newsletter lists as well as sharing each other’s content via social media.  One thing you have to look out for is that if the person or company you are cross promoting with has poor customer service or bad products, then you could anger your own customers, lose their trust in your recommendations and have your next cross promotions become less effective since the trust is gone. 

Video Channels:

Video channels are great, especially if people create spoofs and help you to go viral.  However, annotations and mentions of urls can be confusing, cause typos when people look for your site and have no real call to action.  To get more out of your video, look for players like Viewbix that give you the ability to really add in calls to action, newsletter sign ups and better user experiences in your videos.  You also want to make sure that your channel name is easy to spell, pronounce and remember.  That way people know how to search for it by a unique keyword and be able to find you over and over, as well as recommend you to a friend without the friend getting confused on spelling your channel or video’s name.

Social Media:

If the search engines or Affiliates or PPC end up not being an option anymore, you still have a giant traffic stream out there.  If you set up a membership program or have a loyal following, try to run contests through them with sharing, refer friends and get discounts or coupons, etc…  This can work great to build your customer base and newsletter sign ups back up as well as recover lost income through a new revenue stream.

Blogging:

Blogging is awesome for building a loyal following and an audience.  It can boost your social media followers and fans as well as give you a way to cross promote with other sites better.  The issue you’re going to find is that there is soo much clutter on the web which is why it is very difficult to get a new blog going.

What you need to do is find other bloggers with a large following and launch your blog by guest blogging on their sites.  Even if you don’t get a backlink, if your guest post is good enough then people will look for you and find your site or follow you.  Worrying about backlinks for your blog is not the most important thing in the beginning.  What you need to have first is a ton of good content that will benefit people when they do start to find you.  You should have at least 50 quality posts before you start your outreach.  Not only will that help you know if you will keep the blog going or not, but when people find your site, they’ll see a ton of info there and be able to use it as a resource.  Having a lot of solid content also helps to show the blog owner who you are pitching that you know your stuff and that their readers will be able to learn and stay on topic when they go to your site.

It is important to remember to diversify your income.  These are just a few channels that are easy to get started in and can be somewhat reliable channels.  The thing you have to remember is that you need at least 2 or 3 reliable forms of traffic and sales to be successful.  That way if one fails, the other two are there for you so you can focus on building the other one back up again.

There are a ton of ways to write a newsletters to your Affiliates, but there are also a ton of common errors that I see.  Managers get caught up in their own company and forget that Affiliates work with a ton of merchants and don’t have time to read everything, remember everything about your program or want to open something that is just fluff.  Although you don’t want your newsletter to be too long, you do want to have certain things in every newsletter, and skip certain things for others.  Here are some of the most important things to remember when you are prepping your next newsletter for your Affiliates.

One important thing to remember when writing your Newsletter is that your Affiliates are not your customers so don’t try to sell them.  Instead, talk to them about how to sell your products and services, that is their job.  They joined your program because they like your product, it is your job to teach them how to sell it.

The network you are on – Even though you know which network your program is on, you are one Merchant of possibly thousands.  Make sure to always say within the first paragraph which network you are on.  This makes it easier for your Affiliates to be able to go in and get links, make changes, etc…  If you don’t do this, you may not get as good of a response if they have to log into multiple networks to find where your program is.  If you’re on multiple networks and they find you on another and see they aren’t approved or in the program, you could also create confusion and a bad impression on them.  This could cause them to drop you as well.

Your contact information – Don’t assume that your Affiliates know how to get in contact with you.  Provide them with a phone number, an email address, a Skype name to call, etc…  This way if they have a question they can get a hold of you easily.  Also, if they have a way to contact you and you are responsive, you can build a better relationship and they’ll like the fact that there is someone there to offer them support.

Copy and paste code if you have new creatives or deals – If you talk about deals, specials or new creatives, make sure to include some samples of them in the newsletter and provide them with copy and paste code.  You can use dynamic inserts to place their Affiliate ID within the code so it is ready to go when they get the newsletter.  One thing to make sure you do is test the newsletter first to make sure the code doesn’t turn into links automatically.

Tips on how to promote your program – Saying bid on this term, and giving them a generic term is not helpful.  Providing ten or 15 long tail terms and explaining why they are good is.  You can also say that you have a larger list available and send it to them if they write to you.

Here are some things you can do to help your Affiliates:

• Provide a non generic keyword list
• Give them non generic article ideas and even articles you custom write for them
• Provide SEO tips and advice that isn’t basic or generic that they already know
• Supply ideas for how to use the product in different niches.  This is especially good if you have your Affiliate list broken out into categories
• Send them email subject lines and body copy ideas

Your Affiliates will appreciate how you took the time to make their lives easier by helping them think of ways to promote your business or products.

Offer specials on other services – Many newer Affiliates don’t know about tools like Viewbix or Popshops.  You should contact the Affiliate Managers or Marketing departments and work out a deal for your partners.  Most tools are happy to negotiate because they will hopefully get sales and your Affiliates will get a discount on a service that could potentially benefit them.

Formatting for easy skimming and reading – One thing that drives me crazy is when I get a huge newsletter and there is something important or relevant to me in it, but I have to read the whole thing to find it.  Other times I might save it so I can go back to one section, and then I have to re-read the newsletter just to find it.  Find an easy to read and navigate format for your Affiliates so that they can go directly to the sections that they want to read.

Mention what shows or events you are going to – If you are going to Affiliate Summit, Pubcon or any of the other great shows out there, let your Affiliates know so that they could schedule a time to meet with you and work on a custom strategy.  Putting a name with a face and program makes a huge difference on your relationships with your Affiliates.

There are a ton of other things you can include in your Affiliate newsletters, but these are some of the most important.  I highly recommend you look through your past ones and see what was in it, what wasn’t and try to remember which ones got the best responses.  If all you are doing is sending out fluff, top ten products or coupon codes, you aren’t adding a ton of value.  In fact, if you are just sending out coupon codes you may anger your content Affiliates and lose some of their loyalty to you.  Think about your newsletter, think about how you can add value to your partners and then test to see what is working.  You may also want to write a different Affiliate newsletter for each group of Affiliates in your program.

Linkfarming is something that people used to do and rely on for years with SEO.  Linkfarming is something that worked but now it isn’t that effective, and if Google finds it they can and will penalize you.  Although I don’t ever recommend link farming and don’t think you should use an SEO firm that does, here are three ways that you can get caught and penalized by Google for link farming, even if you didn’t know it was a form of link farming.

Linkfarming is building a network of sites that all link to each other or throughout each other to build authority, backlinks and pagerank.

1.  Placing your company name with text links in the footer of all your sites.  Although you may not realize it, if you have 20 web properties or even just a few and all of them are linking to each other and you have your company name there (with a link), it is easy to map the group of sites together as well as the brand that owns them.  This could be seen as a link farm and could potentially penalize you.  This is a very common type of link farm to see with media companies that own a lot of properties, and the reason they do well with it is because they already had the authority.  Another common place to see this is on as seen on tv products pages where they link all of their products and keywords together in the bottom of the page with the digital agencies name in the bottom of the page with a keyword link.

2.  Using your footer for something other than helping your readers.  Some companies will take their web properties and add in a keyword rich anchor text footer that interlinks all of their properties to rank them.  Not only can this look like a spammy link farm, but it can cause you to get penalized when Google maps it out.  You should be cautious of trying this.  Years ago it worked well, now it can penalize you.  This is also true about putting all of your blogs in your blog roll and interlinking them through the same keywords or names.  You have to change it up and make it legit if you don’t want to risk being penalized or labeled as a link farm. You may also want to remember why people go to a footer and actually build it for them.  User experience is just as important as SEO because if you’re site isn’t functional or easy to use, users will leave and Google knows this.  Put your become an Affiliate link, contact us, sitemap, etc… in the footer which may help to provide a better user experience and probably won’t look like a link farm.

3.  Linking all of your sites on one page as a directory of all of your properties.  Some sites will list all of their properties with links to each of them on one page without changing copy, content or even adding or removing sites.  Although they may do this as a media kit to show where you can advertise, etc… it could be seen as a link farm.  One way to help prevent this is to no index each of these pages so that Google won’t crawl them.  Google can still see them through the Chrome browser, analytics, etc… at least it may know that you are making an attempt not to rank and link them.  If you just nofollow, you could be saying that these sites aren’t trustworthy enough to link to.  One other option is to make the media kit downloadable and blog the spiders from ever being able to see it.

Although there are other ways to accidentally create a link farm like tons of reciprocal linking (when someone links to you and you link back to them), joining an actual link farm, using a link building/trading service, etc… it is best to build natural one way links to your site and avoid penalizations.  You will also want to try to split up the links or make the pages and links not crawlable so that Google can see that you aren’t trying to build a link farm and are legitimately providing value to the website visitor.

One thing that I have begun moving away from for some of my clients is PPC and doing Media Buys instead.  I never thought that I would recommend media over PPC as an instant form of traffic, and for a better ROI or CPA, but with the growing costs and increased competition, Media can now beat out PPC and drive a large amount of quality and targeted traffic if done correctly.  This post is about using Google’s managed placements as a way to drive traffic and sales instead of a traditional media buy which is something that is working amazing right now because of increased and better targeting technology.   The thoughts here are to help you try to think about where to place your ads and how to find the sites that may be able to work for you.  I cannot guarantee it will, but it is working for me and my clients.

The thing you have to remember with PPC and Managed placements as a media buy is that you have two different goals.  With PPC you are bidding on keywords that will being a person to your landing page or website that sells your products.  With managed placements as a media buy you are trying to find where your customers shop and then you need an ad that will generate interest and cause a click and then bring them to your website.  They sound similar but they are completely different.  Here are a few examples.  Then I’ll help show you how to find sites that you may want to use as placements.

If you have a campground and need to rent out spaces. 

With PPC you may geotarget the areas around you, or where your customers tend to come from and bid on terms like campgrounds, cabins for rent, family friendly campgounds, etc…   For managed placements you want to think about where your campers and customers may be going when they are thinking about camping.

With Managed Placements you need to find sites that have adsense on them and create the banners sizes that fit.  For people who would be camping, you may want to look for local camping forums, local camping guides, if one of your selling points is fishing or hiking, find local sites, or national, that show the best fishing and camping spots or even blogs about it.  Then you add in the keywords that are on the pages you want to show on as well as the url and you use ads that target a fishing trip or hiking trip or families having a fun weekend vacation camping.

For targeting eBay or Amazon sellers. 

If you sell a product that is used by eBay or Amazon sellers to list products on eBay or Amazon, for PPC you would bid on things like eBay datafeed tools, automatic Amazon product listings tools, eBay listing creators, etc…  For managed placements you have to think a bit different.

Find organizations, websites, forums, blogs, etc… that have sections, categories or pages that have adsense and are dedicated to helping these store owners with issues that could be a fit for you.  You may also want to find more general eBay powerseller stores or Amazon shop owners where they ask questions and get answers about improving or managing their store.  Then you take keywords like listings, datafeeds, product feeds, how do I list multiple products, etc… into the keywords, load the urls and then upload relevant banners to target them.

Targeting Affiliates (non recruitment)

If you have a general tool that Affiliates could use to create a store or list coupons or other things, instead of bidding on terms like affiliate store creators, affiliate datafeed tools, etc… you will want to think about where these types of affiliates hang out.

You can try conference sites, awards sites, affiliate blogs, how to guides, etc… and then upload the urls of the sites and pages you like as well as the keywords and phrases from the pages you are targeting and show ads that are relevant to them.  For recruiting Affiliates, you need to take a different approach.  I’ll do that in another post.

Finding sites for Managed Placements. 

There are numerous ways to find sites that could be a good fit for managed placements.  My favorite is to take your PPC results that have become to expensive to bid on and type those terms and variations into Google.  Then take the pages and sites that show up for the terms and enter the relevant ones into your url list.

Now add in the keywords that will trigger your ads and you are on your way to getting exposure for those same keywords at a potentially lower cost and bringing in a lower CPA, it will depend on your landing page, etc… as well because you have to speak to them from the pages they came from and not from a direct ad while they were searching for a product or service like yours.

Another option is to use the Google url recommendation tool.  Although I don’t have much luck with it, it does break down the pages and sections for you and can sometimes recommend some awesome sites that you haven’t thought of or found in the search results.

Using Managed Placements for a media buy is a great way to help fight off the costs of PPC and bring in relevant traffic.  The trick is to think about where your potential customers are, what keywords will trigger your ad to show on the pages you want to show them on and then how can you generate an ad and landing page that is relevant for your new customers.  Although this isn’t the first type of media buy I do with a new client, it is one that is proving to be effective and can potentially show a better CPA than PPC campaigns if your costs and CPAs are getting to high.  It may not work all of the time, but I have been having luck with it for my clients.

I recently had a run in with a couple of kind of insane bloggers who were asking for ridiculous things.  One was trying to charge a few hundred dollars for a post, and you have to pay to keep the back links each year, not to mention send them samples for free and write a non promotional article.  This same site was only a PR1, had an alexa ranking over 1.6 million and refused to send me a screen shot of their analytics to show traffic volumes.  Then she started freaking out on me when I said if I can’t prove you have relevant traffic to my client I cannot do this, not to mention I wouldn’t buy or pay for links, especially with her insane policy.  Needless to say I didn’t work with them.

Another one wrote back saying that in order to guest post I have to give them a blog roll, pay for the links and agree to do a media buy on her site.  This was a PR3 site (which was good) and had 5K followers on twitter.  The issue is that she was following more people than what she had as followers so the account wasn’t of much value and there was no traffic on the site, not to mention I would never make a deal like that for a guest post.  That is just stupid!  So how do I evaluate blogs and websites for media buys, seo, etc…?  Here are some of the major things I ask for and look at before I move forward and buy ad space, try to get a backlink or see if they are a good fit as a partner.

First things to look at when evaluating a site or blog.

PR – What is the PR of the site.  Having a higher Page Rank shows that they have a good amount of backlinks coming into their site and that they have some authority in Google’s eyes.

Analytics – If I can get a screen shot of their analytics, this is usually available in the media kit or advertising section, I can tell if they have traffic and not have to rely on third party data collectors.

• Unique Visitors – How many unique visitors are on their site.
• Returning Visitors – Out of those unique visitors, how many return because they are loyal.
• Total Hits – What are the total hits I the site gets so I can estimate a CTR and Conversion Rate.

Twitter Followers – Does the site have a following and is the following just people who follow and the site follows back?  Having 1,000 followers and only following 50 people would be more appealing to me than someone who has 10,000 followers and is following 9,800.  Those people who are following are probably genuinely interested and you can get a better click through rate.  There are other things to look at as well on twitter to tell if they have a good following or not but that’s another post.

Facebook Fanpage Likes – Do they have a lot of likes or a lot of community participation on their Facebook page.  Having 5,000 likes is great, but if no one is reading or commenting it could be a dead community.  Then again they could be reading and just not needing to comment.

Keywords Pointing In – I always look at the keywords that the site gets and then compare them to the keywords conversion rates through other channels.  This helps me estimate a CTR and CR (conversion rate).

How Often They Post – How often is the blog updated and does the traffic fluctuate with that.

Relevance For My Goals – How relevant is the site for a backlink, for sales for legit traffic that my advertisers would like or even to want to share my page and site to get it out to it’s target audience.

Secondary things to look at when evaluating a site or a blog. 

• Comments – Does the blog or site have an active community and readership or are they just leaving random comments and thank yous so that they can get a do or nofollow link.
• ReTweets – How many retweets and tweets go out from each post on the Twitter sharing button.
• Shares – How many Facebook shares does the site get?
• Media Kit and Rate Card – What are their rates and can I work them down.
• Are They Sane or Insane – If they are crazy you probably don’t want them, even if they have great traffic because they can bash you and hurt you just as much.  Instead you can outrank them with good SEO and drive them out of the SERPs.
• Sites Linking In – What sites are linking in and could it harm your site with an association.

Third round of things to look at when evaluating a website or a blog.

• Sell links – Do they sell links?  To Google this is bad.
• Reputation – What is the reputation of the site?
• History – How many changes has there been, was it a spam site, did it ever have copy and indexing that could hurt your brand, etc…
• Age – What is the age of the site to help with the authority.
• Is My Competition There – Do I have competitors there and why or why aren’t they there.
• Do I write the copy or do they – This depends on the type of outreach I am doing.
• Do they provide images or do I – Images can be a pain to do so when a site provides their own it makes my life easier.

These are only some of the things that I look at when evaluating a site or blog for a media buy, to try and get a backlink from as well as having as a partner.  There are a lot of other things to consider when looking at partner sites, but you have to also think about what your goals are.  Are they branding, sales, traffic, SEO, exposure, etc…  Then you can create your own checklist and help to determine what sites are the best potential partners for you and which ones you may want to pass on.

One thing I have been noticing with a couple people who have asked me for proposals is that their image searches are not optimized as well as they could be.  Many of the things aren’t as obvious to think about, but could definitely cause an issue.  What I love about image search for sites selling or reviewing products is that you can get a good click through and conversion rate when your images show up high in the SERPs.  Here are 5 of the image issues I’ve been finding with websites and potential clients lately.

1.  Alt tag duplication.

It’s bad when a site doesn’t use or fill out their alt tags.  (Alt tags are the tags you see in your code that look like alt=”" and tell the search engines what the image is about.)  What a lot of SEOs and people forget to look for are the alt tags on the same image but different pages.  This in theory could cause the images to compete with themselves when the search engines are looking for which one to show.

This is the product grid page at Football Fanatics which is an awesome store for sports tshirts and more.  Wade Tonkin Manages their program on Share a Sale and it is a seriously good one if you have a Football site.

duplicate alt tags seo mistake

This next shot is when I click to find more info and we find the same alt tags for the same image.  By altering their alt tags to be more descriptive, use a different keyword phrase, etc… they could potentially get more traffic from image results.

duplicate alt tags seo mistake 2

2.  Alt tag duplication mistake 2

The next version of alt tag duplication is when you have multiple images on the same page and they all have the same alt tags.  This too could start to confuse the search engines for which to show.  At the same time you are missing out on opportunities to rank for more image searches by not renaming them each for relevant terms and images.  By adding in modifiers or even using different phrases you could make them unique and help them to rank better for more terms.  Here is an example from one of my favorite stores The Fruit Company.  They also have an awesome affiliate program on Share a Sale managed by Jedd Duddfield.  I highly recommend it!

same alt tag on the same page seo issue

3.  Datafeed marketing image mistakes.

When people talk about SEO issues with their datafeeds by submitting their product descriptions, etc… to shopping engines, Affiliate Networks, etc… they often forget two image optimization issues.  1.  To rename all of their images before sending them out and 2.  Renaming all of their alt tags.  By sending out the image name with the same alt tags on each you are creating your own competition every time that image and alt tag are used and show up.

4.  Keyword stuffing your tags and names

One thing some SEOs get carried away with are writing to much for the description.  Try to be detailed and use modifiers that people would search for, but try not to go overboard with them.  Keep them short, simple and what people would be searching for to buy.  Don’t just stuff keywords in because you think they are important.

5.  Not naming your images

Many sites forget to use keywords for the names of their images.  The tech team and designers usually fight back on this, but having properly named images instead of the naming system the tech and design team create is vital for image optimization.  It could mean the difference between appearing and not as the name of the image is a large ranking factor.

There are tons of things that go into image optimization like links, copy, etc…. Unfortunately images are tricky when you get to large sites with tons of them because they take a ton of work to optimize when you have to find each appearance.  If you notice you aren’t getting as much out of image searches as you’d like, try thinking about these 5 seo tips for image searches and then look at what else may be hurting your rankings for image SEO.

Pinterest is a somewhat new social media site that has begun to explode thanks to it’s aggressive app that pushed its way through Facebook and addictive pinning habits that many people, mostly women, are hooked on.  One thing that you don’t see is them ranking high for products inside many of the search engines.  Even with their strong and aggressive apps, their addictive site and ability to go viral, they have serious SEO issues.  By making a few simple and obvious changes, Pinterest can take over, start becoming a shopping comparison engine to raise money and completely grow their traffic faster and for free, not to mention make a ton of money.  Think about these 5 seo mistakes and then what may be missing from your site as well.

1.  Their URL Structure

url structure on pinboards

Pinterest Product URL Mistake

The url structure on Pinterest is great for the boards.  They use dashes and have the keyword name of the boards.  The issue is when you click onto the pins.  They have sloppy urls.  Although the products and copy is there, the url structure is numbers and slashes and that’s all.  If they would make it about the product, be more easily or even able to be crawled, etc… then they could start ranking all of the user generated content with keyword rich urls and take over product rankings.  By enabling the pinned products to be crawled and ranked they could really increase their traffic (There is another example of a product page with an ugly url below, but it isn’t being crawled), but they’ll also have one other issue to worry about.    (Now with that said, they do have other pin pages which are able to be crawled and do have good urls like in the image below.  But those pages have a url redirect issue which is number 3 on this post.)  One other issue is that when you do a site:pinterest.com query in Google you get 33 Million+ pages indexed, but they are all user profiles from a spot check I did.  When I did site:pinterest.com/rollerbladerdc I noticed that they only pulled my profile and non of my boards, products, etc…   This is a crawling and indexing issue.

2.  Duplicate Title Tags

If you look at the two example images above, you’ll notice that even though the url changes, the title tags don’t change.  If they would enable products to be crawled and indexed easier, or more clearly, they’ll have to fix their title tags since when you click on a pin the title’s stay the same.  One thing they are doing that is good is not allowing some of the duplicate pages to be crawled.

3.  Product URL Redirects and 404 Dead Pages.

If you notice in the top image I capitalized the P in pin.  This caused a 404 error page.  When I capitalize or lower case letters in other pages, some redirect correctly while others turn into 404 pages.  If you would build backlinks to the pages and the same url gets indexed that way, while a page with the lower case that works is indexed, you create an issue for the Search Engines.  They should be redirecting all urls to the same one to prevent duplicate content and pages from being able to be indexed.  The 301 redirect is perfect for this since it says that the same copy will be on this page.  Then they can use canonical tags to show which is the page to index.

Pinterest URL Redirect Issue 404 Page

Pinterest URL Duplicate URL

4.  Pinned Product Page URLs and Title Tags

In this example I pinned a product this morning.  The issue with this is the Title Tag.  Look how long and ugly it is.  They need to find a way to shrink it back down.  Also, they use the board as the first part of the title.  What they may also want to look at is pulling keywords or having a product title space placed into the add pin section and that can become the title and then they can auto import the description up to 150 characters or whatever their optimization limit is, in for the description tag.

pinned product url

5.  Alt Tags and Image Names

When I was searching through the code on the pages I noticed one obvious SEO mistake for images.  They did name their alt tags on their images correctly which is awesome, however they did not name the image when uploaded into the actual urls.  Instead of a giant string of numbers.jpg, they could have easily taken the alt tag and used that name and then maybe added numbers if it is duplicate to the image name.  This would probably help them with image searches inside some of the major Search Engines.

image names

Pinterest is an awesome and addictive site where you can build a following and fans for your blog as well as make money.  They have grown virally by using aggressive apps and Facebook as well as by word of mouth.  By fixing a few things within their site they could really take their SEO to the next level.  Think about the basics that are missing from your site and see if you have any of these issues as well and think about how you can fix them.

Just for fun I wanted to do a post about some of my favorite marketing and branding mistakes, as well as show you Facebook’s diagram for connecting people for sex.  Some of these might be marketing myths and others are true, but they are all fun and ones that I’ve heard over the years.  Feel free to leave your favorite ones in the comments section, but make sure to source it if you are claiming it is true.

Three Marketing Mistakes that I learned about in College.

Coca-Cola in China – When coca-cola moved into China, they forgot to look up what some of the translations were.  In a few regions it ended up meaning “Bite the wax tadpole”.  They didn’t sell a ton of them.  Snopes says that this is partially true.

Gerber Baby Foods in Africa – When Gerber Foods opened up in Africa they kept their labeling like they have in the USA with the picture of a baby on the label.  In some of the regions of Africa where they were trying to sell the product the people were illiterate and had no way to know what was carrots or vegetables or what.  Instead they relied on images on the packages to tell them what was inside.  Unfortunately for Gerber, not many of them wanted to eat mushed up babies.  Mary White at LovetoKnow mentioned this same marketing mistake in a post.

Chevy Cars in Mexico – Everyone in the USA knows who Chevy is and many people love the trucks.  However, when they decided to move to Mexico with some of their cars, one of them was the Chevy Nova.  In Spanish, va is a conjugated form of the verb Ir which means to go.  When you add the word no to it, the meaning now becomes No Go, or to the Mexican people it was a car that wouldn’t go anywhere.  Sales started off pretty slow and they changed the name for Mexico.  Unfortunately for the people who like this story, it is apparently not true according to about.com.  In some Latin American countries sales actually exceeded expectations.

One Marketing Mistake I learned at Trivia Night.

KFC selling chicken in China – We all know and many of us love KFC.  Their wedge fries, original recipe and honey barbeque wings are awesome.  They sell great snack versions of sandwiches and many people love their pulled bbq sandwiches as well.  Unfortunately when they went into China they forgot to look at what their slogan meant.  In the US we all remember finger licking good, in China it was “Bite Your Fingers Off”.  Thanks but I’d rather have the sandwich than my fingers.  This may be true according to Bizenstein.

One Marketing Mistake I heard and looked up.

Coors Light in Spain – When Coors decided to use one of it’s slogans “Turn it Loose” in Spain, there was a slight issue with the translation of the slogan.  Instead of meaning turn it loose, it meant “Suffer from Diarrhea”.  Although funny to think about, not the diarrhea, you’d probably get a kick of out seeing that on a billboard, especially with all the people having fun they used for the “Tap the Rockies” commercials.  Apparently this one may be true according to Socialnomics.

One Marketing Mistake that I noticed with friends after hearing someone say it when we were out.

Facebook pushing sex around the world – Facebook apparently has another goal in mind, besides connecting people to socialize.  Apparently they may also want to connect people with the subliminal message of sex around the world.  Although this is fake and I’m pretty sure is not one of the goals of Facebook, how could you argue with their log in page which I took a screen shot of this morning and connected the people with?  This is definitely something made up, but a fun marketing mistake which you can still go and see for yourself as of this morning.  Facebook.

Facebook and Sex

Marketing mistakes are always fun to hear about, as long as no one got hurt.  When they go really bad like some of the ones above, sometimes the extra publicity can actually help them increase sales because people get a good laugh at the incorrect messaging.  The incorrect messaging can also cause their brand to be remembered and if they run a good campaign after already have peoples’ attention.

I was just working on Affiliate approvals and declines for a Client of mine when I got an auto generated email from a newer coupon site. This Affiliate applied to just about everyone inside the network and when you get the email back from them, after you hit decline or approve, you get their auto responder asking the Merchant for a banner exchange and backlink to their site. Although this may sound good to a new merchant or an inexperienced Affiliate Manager, or corrupt Manager or OPM, this is in no way good for your company or your Affiliate program. Here’s why. (BTW, I have a few posts on this blog about how to reduce coupon code box abandonment which is one of the arguments they give in that they can help with it. Here is one called What to do about your Coupon Code Box.)

1. Other Affiliates
2. Current Customers
   a. No value
   b. Paying again
3. Boosting Your Competition
   a. Affiliate sites (good and bad)
   b. If they leave you

1. Other Affiliates.

Giving backlinks to coupon sites or other Affiliates off of your main site is not good for your program for multiple reasons. One main one is that if you are linking to a coupon site and you have content Affiliates, the coupon site with Affiliate links will have a very good chance at overwriting the original content Affiliate’s cookie when the shopper goes there for a coupon, and the content site who added value will lose the sale. If their sales keep getting over written, or if they realize your competition doesn’t do this, they will leave your program and sometimes will let other Affiliates know that you are allowing their sales to be stolen, which will take the work you did recruiting value adding affiliates and you’ll also be building your competitors program with new value adding sales because your content sites left you.

2. Current Customers

One of the things you have to remember as a merchant is that you are paying to send people to your website via ppc, email, etc… By sending people from your site to a Coupon Affiliate’s site, you are now taking the people you paid to bring to your site and sending them somewhere to get cookied by the Affiliate and having that Affiliate send them back with a tracking cookie on it. Now you have lost a ton of money and margin, here’s why.

You just spent:

1. Money to bring a customer to your site
2. Paid an affiliate commission
3. Paid a network fee
4. Paid out on a coupon or discount and lost more margin
5. Paid your manager or OPM to take a customer they did not help in referring and took credit for the sale

That is 5 fees you have now paid just to bring a customer that was already on your site back when you never had to send them away in the first place.

a. No value – What I mean by no value to you in this is that if all you are doing is sending your customers to an Affiliate for them to send them back to you, then they are adding no value to you.  Instead you are hurting yourself by showing your customers where to get extra discounts and now potentially having to pay extra fees and give discounts just to get the sales you would have had anyways.  The only possible extra value you could get is if they give you permanent homepage, newsletter, etc… placements and they have millions of active users.  Most of these sites will never do that though because if they only keep promoting the same merchants, their users get tired of their site, bored of the deals and go to another coupon site with more variety.

b. Paying again – I just wanted to say one more time that by sending your own traffic to an Affiliate’s site, you will probably have to repay for that same customer.  You lose margin and you also pay fees you would never have had to pay if you didn’t make that mistake.

3.  Boosting Your Competition

By linking from your site, especially the homepage, you are basically giving your Affiliate a backlink to optimize for your own trademarks and domains.  Not only does this help boost them higher in the engines, but it can help them to outrank you since your link is saying to the search engines that their site is actually an authority about you and possibly over your own site.  This backlink is stupid to give to them regardless.  If you do decide to do it, make sure you add in a no follow tag so that at least you aren’t hurting yourself or helping someone to outrank you.

a. Affiliate sites (good and bad)  – I said it is stupid to do this above, but in one scenario it can be good.  If the Google autocomplete has reviews or scam in it and all of the results are bad ones, you can use this to help rank a site into the top ten and replace a negative review.  However, hiring someone to do Online Reputation Management SEO (ORM),  is your better choice because then you can start to control the reviews and scam listings and help to show that you are legit.  If you rank your Affiliates for them and you anger them, guess what, you don’t own the Affiliates’ sites and they can easily bad mouth you, replace your links with competitors and encourage shopping at other stores or they can cause a bad user experience by posting expired deals for you and working ones for your competition.  It is much smarter to optimize your own sites for those terms and have your own coupon sites and get them ranking for your trademark +coupon, etc…

b. If they leave you – I covered this above, but if you rank your Affiliates above or right underneath you and you have to part ways with them because of a bad relationship or nexus tax laws, etc… you now have someone who has your rankings and can and probably will send the traffic to a competitor since their goal is the same as yours, they want to make money.  This is also why it is important to not give backlinks to your Affiliates, especially coupon and loyalty sites from your own site.

I am 100% opposed to giving Affiliates backlinks from the Merchant’s site.  It causes unfair advantages for other partners, can cause you to lose margin and sales as well as takes more control out of your hands within the search engines and top ten results.  If you insist on giving a backlink to your partners, you may want to set up a different site or blog and link to them from there.  That way it isn’t a leak on your site, isn’t as harmful and since everyone can have one, it isn’t creating as much of an unfair advantage.

Years ago SEOs would do mass directory submissions as part of their SEO strategy. Now if your SEO company has a large focus on directories you should probably run the other way. That doesn’t mean that all directories are bad, they just aren’t and shouldn’t be a focus on your SEO plan. Instead you should think about a few things.

1. Does the directory have traffic that can convert into sales or leads
2. Is the directory in your niche or relevant to your site
3. What is the quality of the directory and how does it rank or appear in the eyes of a search engine

By evaluating a directory, you can make a smarter decision on if it is a good place to list your company, and if you should be there. Don’t think about it from just an SEO standpoint, think about it from sales and branding as well. Here are 5 directories that I enjoy, have used or currently use.

Best of the Web (BOTW)
Alexa – 7,331
PR – 6

In my interview with SEO Rae Hoffman-Dolan, she even agrees that BOTW is still a relevant directory. The reason I enjoy them isn’t just the PR6 backlink you get, but the fact that they rank well for numerous terms and they have a large amount of traffic. Their directory is handled and managed properly and very well maintained. That is one of the reasons I will still recommend them.

Business.com
Alexa – 6,811
PR – 7

One thing that I like about Business.com is the fact that they can generate sales. They have a directory as well as PPC engine, comparison engine and article directory. Although those would normally be a red flag for SEOs, in this case it is a well established and very nice system that can drive traffic and sales for your company and clients if you are in the B2B space. I have been using them for years and still enjoy my relationship with them.

AffiliatePrograms.com
Alexa – 33,268
PR – 4

To be honest I haven’t listed with them for a long time. However I have used them in the past and was happy with the results. The nice thing is that they rank in the top positions in many SEs for terms like Affiliate Programs. They also rank within the top ten for mixes of those terms like Affiliate Marketing Programs. The downside that I found was that I was getting more newbies that I had to work closely with to grow. The only reason that that is a downside is that it takes a while to help them build up their sites so they can send you traffic and sales. The nice thing is that I did get a few solid performers who had established sites, just heard about Affiliate Marketing and were just looking for programs and came across them in the SEs.

Job-Hunt.org
Alexa – 85,454
PR – 7

This is an awesome site that is very well established, extremely well maintained and can drive lots of sales, leads and conversions for you if you are in the job space. Not only does it have a high PR, but the value comes from the content and the quality of the traffic that it attracts. This is one of my favorite niche directories. You have to remember that because it is niche, it may not have as much total traffic as some of the general directories, but because it is niche, the traffic may be more relevant for you.

Yahoo.com
Alexa – 4
PR – 9

Ok, with this one I am always back and forth. Years ago it was worth the money for the backlink alone, now it can be argued either way. It was the go to directory after DMOZ. The other benefit of the Yahoo directory was that you would get traffic that could convert into sales. Even if the backlink wasn’t that good, you still got your money’s worth from the Yahoo Directory. The reason that it is on this list is that there are a few SEOs that I respect that do use it but don’t say that publicly. If they still like it, then I think it should be here.

Some directories are still relevant and can be great for your business. Other directories can create issues with your linking structure and may hurt you a bit in the long run. It is important to evaluate the benefits and issues with each and then make a decision. One thing to keep in mind though is that Directories should be a very small part of any SEO plan and not something to rely on.