SEO EXPERTS

To put it simply, affiliates are companies, individuals or groups that promote advertisers through various forms of affiliate marketing.

What differentiates types of affiliates from one another is which method of affiliate marketing they choose to use. The 6 main affiliate type are….

Personal and special interest websites
Affiliates run websites that cater to a certain niche in the online marketplace and can be the perfect way for merchants to target users specifically interested in certain products and drive great quality traffic. Sites that would fall into this would be offering freebies, information on hobbies or certain topics, also games and bingo sites, and retail and travel related sites.

Niche affiliates may run newsletters, allowing them to push relevant users towards merchants rather than simply running merchants’ offers onsite. This significantly increases conversion rates.

Reward and loyalty sites
Loyalty and reward sites build websites where they market merchants to their users then split the profits. They could do this by giving the users “cash back” ir give them “points” where the user can go and buy things at discount or even a prize.

The idea is that by splitting the profits with their users, these affiliates can build a “loyal” database of users who are happy to but stuff online through the websites because they feel they are “getting something back”.

PPC and search affiliates
PPC (Pay Per Click) and search affiliates bid on keywords in search engines to help drive traffic to a merchant’s site by using the sponsored listings inside Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other PPC engines such as MIVA and Search7.

Affiliates are also allowed to use brand terms and improve merchant rankings using Organic SEO.

Depending on which merchant you use, they don’t always allow you to use their brand name. Always read the merchant TOS (Terms Of Service) before going ahead.

Email Marketing
Email affiliates send email campaigns to their users (which in this case would be subscribers). Companies that specialise in email marketing have huge and comprehensive lists which allow merchant’s to target specific niches within their target market. Email marketers usually are paid on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis.

Co-registration
Co-registration is quite a new form of affiliate marketing and allows users to “opt-in” to receive offers from third party merchants when registering on a site, but only when the user ticks a box saying it’s ok to do that.

The user’s registration details are then passed to the merchant who pays the affiliate for the users information.

Affiliate networks
Affiliate networks establish themselves as “top tier” affiliates exposing merchant offers to their own networks of affiliates while also providing account management and assistance where needed. These large scale networks are often capable of providing email marketing, co-registration, PPC and classic affiliate banners and skyscrapers to be run on their affiliate’s websites.

The best thing is, if you really wanted to and your site is big and good enough, you could incorporate all of these into one campaign.

For a product to be successful, market research is very important.
On the internet, market research mainly revolves around keyword and niche
researches.
This subject of keyword research actually needs an entire book devoted to it. So,
I will not dwell too much into it.
Basically for keyword research, we will need to find highly searched keywords
that do not have too much competing sites. The products that one is creating
should cater to these areas. In short, look for something with high demand, but
low competition.
Products that have too many competing sites are very hard to sell as the
competition is too great. It is very hard for your site to rank high on the search
engines. Without a good ranking, your site will not be easily found by potential
customers.
On the other hand, a product that has no one searching for will also be
unprofitable, even when there are very few competing sites.

For keyword research, some of the free tools available are:
Wordtracker free keyword suggestion tool
SEO Book keyword suggestion tool

Basically, these tools provide figures on the estimated number of searches for
related keywords.
To check for the potential profitability of the keyword/niche, you can compare the
number of searches for the keyword to the number of competing sites.
High keyword searches and low competitions denote good chance of profitability.
Basically, you use the search engines to gather information on number of
competing sites and page rank.