Welcome to the 'Affiliate Marketing Basic Tools' section.
Basic tips, tricks and tools for the newcomer to affiliate marketing — as well as one or two useful articles for the advanced affiliate marketer.
Have you been trying to replicate the look and behavior of Google AdSense units — for example, to display alternative ads of your own when AdSense ads are not available? It’s a popular idea, but if you’re doing it with old-fashioned font declarations and 1990s-era HTML, you’re missing the boat.
Have your conversions dropped? Or are you just in awe at how impressively your traffic levels have grown over the last few months? Either way, bad bots — automated crawlers that ignore established web standards for excluding them — could be inflating your traffic levels beyond all recognition. Unless you are taking specific steps to handle them, it’s likely that you don’t nearly as much as you’d like to know about your own web traffic.
So you’ve read our previous article on the ‘Top 5 Reasons to Avoid Javascript Datafeeds’, and you’re wondering what to do if you really have to use a Javascript feed — for instance, because that’s all your merchant provides. You’ve come to the right place… This article explains some of the steps you can take to overcome some or even all of the disadvantages of a Javascript feed.
Barry over at SE Roundtable mentions a new blog dedicated specifically to link building, run by the folks behind Text Link Ads. Already a few good articles are turning up in the new link building blog.
Over at SEO Book, Aaron takes a look at some of the caveats that are worth keeping in mind when watching Alexa rankings going up or down. As he points out, only a very small increase or decrease in actual site traffic can have an enormous impact on reported Alexa ranking. An article at a different site offers another look at factors that can bounce Alexa rankings.
This simple and free CGI script allows you to track clicks in any Google AdWords contextual advertising campaign — it processes your Apache server logs on any Unix platform and lets you know exactly what content pages are delivering your clicks.
Webmasters new to affiliate marketing may be drawn to Javascript-based ‘live pricing’, often used in free affiliate template sites provided by merchants. Here are my top 5 compelling reasons to steer clear of Javascript-based live pricing (sometimes called ‘Javascript datafeeds’) whenever possible.