Many sites relies on affiliate marketing to pay their bills. Pandia discusses search engine optimization with Play65, a company running a backgammon affiliate program.

“Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.” So says the Wikipedia.

Indeed it is. In return for bringing a paying customer to their web pages, most affiliate sites are willing to pay you, the webmaster, a certain percentage of the price. Variants include pay per click, pay per lead (registrants), or fixed commissions for each sale.

A source of much needed webmaster revenue

On the positive side affiliate marketing has made it possible for a large number of enthusiasts to develop sites on the topic of their interest, using the income generated from relevant agreements to pay the bills and – if they a very good at this – their salaries as well.

Pandia would, for instance, never have been able to survive for eight years without this kind of revenue. One of our bestsellers has been the Planet Ocean SEM tutorial and newsletter (and yes, that is an affiliate link!).

Affiliate marketing as a profession

Some webmasters have turned this into a full time profession, developing a large number of websites, all paid by affiliate fees (and/or Google text ads, as may be).

If you find the right niches and develop the right techniques you may actually earn quite a lot as an affiliate. But it takes a lot of work, and you have to develop an efficient network to get access to the innermost secrets of the trade.

The importance of search engine optimization

What all these sites have in common, merchants as well as affiliate partners, is that they rely on search engine traffic to generate visits, click-throughs and sales. Their search engine marketing capabilities are therefore essential for their success.

In general, the same rules apply to dedicated affiliate sites as any other sites. We will not repeat all the points made in the Pandia Search Engine Marketing tutorial here. However, the most successful SEO tactics for affiliate marketing include:

1. Writing a lot of useful and informative articles on the relevant topic
2. Getting a lot of inbound links from sites focusing on the same topic

Allan Gardyne puts it this way:

The secret is NOT to be found in forever hunting for one more marketing tip. The secret is always taking action, doing something useful every day, day after day so that your affiliate business is always improving.(…) Do one of these every day: 1. Add an article to your website. 2. Get a link to your site.

Many of these affiliate sites have useful content that is of use to their visitors. Others, however, are cutting corners, reproducing the text provided by the merchant only, or even stealing text from other sites in order to generate that sale. A common trick is to register a large number of domains under different names and identities and filling the sites with thousands of pages of automatically generated crap. Needless to say, the search engines are not happy about this.

The merchants

The other side of affiliate search engine marketing belongs to the affiliate merchants, i.e. the companies that make use of affiliates in their own marketing strategies. The benefits are enormous. By giving away a piece of the pie, these merchants may get a large number of people to market their products for them, in many different ways and through a large number of web sites and paid text ads.

The downside to all this is that they may find it very hard to control the way these affiliates market their products or services. The presence of their brand on an amateurish or spammy site may reflect badly on their brand and their product, and they may be blamed for what their affiliate partners write on their web sites.

Play65

We asked one of our own sponsors, the online backgammon site Play65, about their experience with affiliate marketing and search engine marketing. Play65 has the largest game room in this part of the online gaming industry.

Chen Z., could you tell us what kind of affiliate program you offer your partners?

We offer our partners a free risk affiliate program full of advantages. Being Play65’s partners simply means that you promote Play65 either online or offline, earning the highest commission in the skill games industry. You are not required to make any investment. All you have to do is use our professional marketing tools to bring in new players and/or sub affiliates.

For each real player (a player who makes real-money transactions), or sub affiliate that joins us via your marketing efforts you earn a high commission, in accordance with the payment plan you chose – CPA/revenue sharing.

It seems that you have decided not to go through one of the larger affiliate networks, like Commission Junction. Could you tell us why this is so?

In a matter of fact, we do run a number of campaigns at affiliate networks – such as: Commission Junction, Affiliate window, Zanox etc.
Play65partners is our official independent affiliate program which provides reliable online statistics, similar to the ones at the networks.

You have a multi tier program, whereby partners that recruit new members of the affiliate program, get a percentage of their sales as well. Do you think that this is an important motivation for many of your partners?

The sub-Affiliate program enables affiliates to increase their profits even further by referring other webmasters to Play65 affiliate program. Each new sub-affiliate credits his owner 15% share of his or her profit for their life time activity. Some of our best affiliates get their work done by others…

Needless to say, most affiliate partners rely on search engines to generate traffic, and through that sales that benefit both them and your company. Do you in any way help them in their search engine marketing efforts?

Each affiliate has is own dedicated agent who escort him during the procedure of promoting Play65, sharing his experience and knowledge in order to increase affiliates’ revenues. In addition, we have a variety of experts that are available to advise our affiliates constantly, each on his professional field (such as SEO,PPC and etc)

Moreover, our affiliates receive a newsletter on monthly basis, which contains great variety of useful marketing tips, industry news, monthly bonuses and much more. Our affiliate department makes a great effort to provide each month a focused newsletter full of marketing advices.

You provide samples of both banners and text links. The banner ad has been declared dead for years now. Do you still feel that it can be an efficient marketing tool compared to the more search engine friendly text ad?

Each marketing tool holds a variety of advantages and refers to different target audience. Banners are mostly used at private sites as a way to promote complimentary product. Not all affiliates devote full time to promote a certain product.

Given that “content is king”, do offer your partners advice on how to write good copy and where to find information and inspiration?

Of course! Sometimes we supply our affiliates origin content for their own use. Soon we will load to our “marketing tools farm” a variety of useful content about backgammon rules, backgammon for money, how to play backgammon, Internet backgammon, history of backgammon, backgammon matches, backgammon tournaments etc. — all in order to facilitate the promotion as much that we can.

If you were to select two search engines marketing techniques that have proved to be very efficient among your affiliate partners, what would those be?

I believe that quality link development and unique and compelling content are the most effective SEM techniques.

By having a large number of affiliates, you also get a large number of sites that link to your main sites: Play65 (the gaming site) and Play65partners (your affiliate site) . These inbound links should in theory boost the authority and ranking of your own site, as they are all coming from related sites focusing on the same topic. Is this part of your own search engine marketing strategy, and if so, is the tactic working?

In fact, affiliates’ links doesn’t help our main sites at all.

The reason for that is the fact that each affiliate gets his specific link (http://www.play65.com/index.html?did=###).The ‘did’ is used to personalize the affiliates’ tracker so that the system track each of the referrals back to his account, and credit him accordingly.

What is your policy towards affiliate partners that use more aggressive and unsavoury techniques in their marketing? To give some examples: sites that do search engine spamming or spamdexing, email spamming, that are scraping content of other sites, that do typosquatting (using domain names that are close to the ones of major companies in the area) or just developing sites with no original content whatsoever.

We do not encourage any illegal activity, no matter what! Nevertheless, we can not control thousands of people whom promote Play65.

Do you have ways of identifying such sites and if you catch them, what do you do about them?

We try doing our best preventing this kind of activity beforehand, by forbidding this at our pre-agreement. As soon as we discover affiliates that act against the rules we ask them to cease immediately, the progressing step is cutting off the cooperation.

Do you encourage affiliate partners to promote your product using Google Adwords or other pay-per-click text ad programs? And, if so, do you allow them to use your trade mark in the ads?

We do encourage PPC campaigns; we prefer that our affiliates will use landing pages, but we usually don’t interfere at affiliates’ work.

How do you feel about competitors using your brand as a keyword and headline in Adsense ads? Should Google stop this from happening?

After all this is a free market, our competitors can act however they’d like. Furthermore, competition makes us more efficient and stronger!