3 Ways to Be an Affiliate Google Loves in 2010

This is a guest post. Chris Thunder is a Google Adwords Professional helping business owners thrive using Adwords on TenCentClic.com and helping people like you reduce their adwords costs with the 10 Scores ebook available at TenScores.com. If you’re interested in writing a guest post, please click here.

“Google doesn’t like affiliate marketers”

I’m sure you’ve heard that sentence in some shape or form this past year.

Affiliates are whining that they’ve been slapped or completely banned from advertising on Google adwords.

Many have decided to abandon the adwords field in search for less hostile environments, on the endless quest for green pastures (and by green I mean “dollar-bill” green).

The promise land? Facebook, some say (wink @ Mr Volk)… Or Yahoo, or Plenty Of Fish, or PPV… or let’s just do SEO.

The truth is Google Adwords isn’t going anywhere.

Adwords is still the best place to instantly get quality visitors to almost any website. You can do it fast, you can do it cheaply if you know how and you can do it without getting slapped or banned.

And they have nothing against affiliates, they just have something against you!

Yes, you:

If you promote scams…
If you’re dishonest or shady in any way with your visitors…
If you’re not adding any value to the world wide web and its users…

It’s all about quality and value. Not in your eyes, but in the eyes of searchers and in the eyes of Google.

Here are 3 ways to effectively promote an affiliate website with Google in 2010.

1) Build A Double Opt-In List

The idea is that people won’t see your affiliate offers until they’re on your list. Lead generation is one of the best thing you can ever do to build a stable business just like John Chow does and Google is perfectly fine with it. As long as you provide value and you’re transparent about what you do with people’s information.

Set up a lead generation campaign, send visitors to landing page with a form that collects emails. After a visitor fills the form, send them to a page that asks them to confirm their subscription and nothing else.

Once they’re on your list, start building a relationship with an auto-responder and send them to your great (I mean AWESOME) affiliate offers that add value to their lives!

Do not send them to affiliate offers early in the auto-responder or might be labeled a “thin affiliate”, deliver massive value instead then when you’ve established trust with
a subscriber after the 3rd, 4th or 5th email, tell them about one affiliate offer then another.

Don’t just promote one offer or just one type of offer, find a curriculum of offers
that complement each other in the same niche.

For example if you’re in the scrapbooking niche, start with an ebook that teaches scrapbooking, then promote a CPA offer on a cutting machine, then promote a special scrapbooking desk that helps in keeping things tidy, then promote a special software that allows people to use their computer for designing scrapbooking shapes… you get the idea!

There are plenty of lateral offers you can promote in just one niche, and that is only possible when you have a list. Be the angel that guides your subscribers to discovering new ways of enjoying life a little more in a particular area they’re passionate about.

2) Become a direct reseller of the product

This is done by sending visitors from your website directly to the order form without passing by the product owner’s website. This way you’re no longer seen as an intermediate but as a direct reseller.

Create your own sales funnel and make sure you set things up with a twist. Do not copy the product owner’s website, find an original way to sell the product.

Make sure you capture people’s emails just before sending them to the order page so that you can build a list and promote other offers to them. This is important.

This goes without saying but you’ll need the product owner’s approval before you do this (or you might get into legal trouble with him or her). Most will approve.

3) Direct link to offers that aren’t heavily promoted

Direct link? Yes, direct link. There is an enormous amount of affiliate products to promote, but for some reason affiliates tend to promote the same ones… and no one wins (or at least just a few of them).

A large proportion of vendors don’t have a clue about online marketing so they never touch adwords. And a larger proportion simply focuses on organic rankings.

Find good products that aren’t heavily promoted on Adwords and create direct linking campaigns.

When I say direct linking, I don’t mean masked redirects, I don’t mean iframes… those will get you in trouble. I mean your affiliate link in the destination url and the parent company domain name as the display url. Google has nothing against that.

One important thing for direct linking: choose your offer extremely carefully!

Your name is linked to everything you do in adwords and you don’t want to be associated with a shady business.

So…

a. No scams! Choose big brand name companies if you can. I’m talking about promoting Jenny Craig instead of Acai Berry 3000.

b. Find offers that aren’t heavily promoted in the area of your choice. If a website is promoted by too many different people it gets attention from Google and other advertisers’ mistakes may stain your own reputation. The world is big and networks have international offers to be promoted outside the US.

The draw-back of direct linking is that you might have a low impression share (unless your ads are very high quality). Impression Share is the percentage of times your ad is shown vs the number of time it could be shown.

Google has an enormous inventory of available traffic and it’s hard to grasp its magnitude. 90% of it come from the content network (now called display network). Start with the content network to test an offers, see if you can get some traffic and conversions. Target demographics accordingly and learn how to create magnetic ads.

If your offer is from a great legitimate business, if you get high click-through-rates, Google will love you, decrease your costs and increase your exposure and help you make money.

This should be enough information for the whiners to stop whining and start making some money.

And if you’ve been banned, well… sorry! there’s nothing I can do for you. Unless you buy me a beer then I can show you exactly how to get back in.

Enough said. I have some money to make, you should too…