A successful affiliate needs the right tools and resources to maximize conversions, and create and maintain a successful online presence. Part of this equation also includes staying in-the-know about important industry information, and keeping abreast with current search news, as this provides the affiliate with further opportunity to target additional market segments.

So when Microsoft and Yahoo! reached a deal whereby Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power Yahoo search, it got our attention. As you know, getting ranked in search engines takes time. Whether that transition period takes an affiliate 6 months, 12 months or longer, it can be a definite advantage to start optimizing now, to ensure you get found later.

There is still so much up in the air, like when exactly this will go live, but here’s what we know for sure.

What We Know for Sure
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo’s core search technologies.
• Bing will become the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo sites.
• Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
• Microsoft’s AdCenter platform will fulfill self-serve advertising for both companies, and AdCenter will set prices for all search ads.
• The deal is estimated to be worth an extra $500 million in annual operating income and $200 million in capital expenditure savings to Yahoo.

What Yahoo Says
“This deal will make the difference between a great Yahoo! search experience and an awesome one!” Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz. In an interview with CNBC, Bartz talks about the aspects of Yahoo’s strategy, and its value to consumers, advertisers and publishers.

What Microsoft Says
“This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.” Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer.

What this Means for Affiliate Marketing
It’s far too early to draw any conclusions, but we think at the very least that affiliates should start optimizing for both Bing AND Google, and that Bing certainly has the potential of becoming a strong competitor. Especially since Yahoo will be powered by it in the upcoming future.

What We Like About Bing
What is interesting about Bing’s platform is that it focuses on making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business. This kind of platform is great for affiliates, who are often involved in helping consumers make decisions about which products and services they should buy.

And so far the feedback on Bing is pretty positive. It’s still too early to say whether people will make a permanent switch away from Google, but either way, we think the online playing field is changing, and affiliates best optimize now, and Bing later.

What are your thoughts on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal? Will this affect the way you conduct your affiliate marketing?

Exciting times! Google is in the process of introducing a new version of their popular search engine named Caffeine. Unlike Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, which is distinguished by its focus on user interface modifications, Google’s new venture promises to keep the changes ‘under the hood’. Google Caffeine’s focal point is to improve the indexing speed of searches. Users shouldn’t see much of a difference unless they are web developers or power searchers, so if you’re one, keep reading!

Why the change?

According to Matt Cutts of Google, “Caffeine will be more powerful, flexible and robust – allowing Google to index faster.” Not only will the new Google offer speedier searches, the results are supposedly more accurate. The accuracy is essentially based on relevancy, with ‘caffeinated’ results displaying more prominently to lesser relevant sites.

This week’s featured affiliate marketing bloggers cover the Google Caffeine developments with their own testing methods by covering aspects like speed, relevancy, and site ranking while coming up with enlightening results…

1. Mashable Blog is a great resource focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. Mashable is a prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what’s new on the web and offering social media resources and guides.

2. Anhblog is a blog dedicated to helping people of all walks of life better their learning of the online marketplace. Moderated by Mr. Tran Viet Anh, the blog concentrates on a variety of pertinent issues facing online business. From social media to SEO, Anhblog is a fantastic tool for furthering your knowledge.

If your blog has been added to our BAMroll, don’t forget to pick up a badge! See you next week!

Not only do blogs offer a bunch of SEO benefits, but they are also a great community building tool, and building a strong community  lets an affiliate attract and retain new customers. So when you run a blog in the right way, it can become a great addition to your affiliate site, or even make for its own, separate affiliate portal.  But running a blog properly also requires proper blogging etiquette.

Blogging for Community

Just like a forum, blogs let users express themselves and interact with one another by leaving comments. So by publishing product reviews and news, and reporting on special promotions, you can build a community of users looking for a reliable source of up-to-date information. And as these users discuss your content and share their own ideas, they’ll build relationships with one another, and that kind of interaction will keep them coming back.

Blogging for SEO

A big part of SEO is getting your site content frequently indexed by search engines. Because of the way that blogs publish content, they can help you get your site indexed more often, and possibly rank higher in search results.

First, using categories and tags, a blog structures content, and that help search engines better index it for the right keywords. Second, blogs let you create structured URLs that contain keyword-rich title information. So as long as your post titles describe the post content, these structured URLs will help let search engines determine what your content is all about.

Finally, blogs provide you with a platform to easily update your site with fresh content, and the more that a site is updated, the more that a search engine will index that site. You see, search engines regard frequently updated sites as more authoritative because their information is more recent. So by blogging on a regular basis, you can help your site (1) get indexed more often, and (2) gain more authority with search engines.

Best Blogging Practices

Of course, if you’re going to use a blog to its full potential, you should also respect the medium for what it is. First, blogging is a social medium. This means that its potential lies in the relationships it helps you build with users. So if you neglect this relationship component and simply use your blog for its SEO potential, the results are going to be limited.

Second, you should take care to properly format your content . Make sure to make full use of categories and tags, and write keyword-relevant headlines for your posts. Also, if you don’t post original content at least three times a week (although five is preferable), you’ll miss out being frequently indexed by search engines.

If you incorporate a blog into your affilaite portal and start posting regularly, you should start seeing the first SEO returns within a couple weeks. And if you don’t let up, make an effort to build relationships with your users and participate in the conversation, over time you will build a veritable community, and that community will represent a defenisble and sticky source of return traffic.

Does your traffic fluctuate noticeably? Are you not sure why it’s happening? Do sudden drops in your traffic cost you money?

If so, you might want to consider a recent post by Problogger. Even though Darren Rowse (the Problogger) blogs mostly about, well, blogging, he nonetheless offers 6 clues as to what the cause of an increase or decrease in traffic might be, and what you can do about it:

1. Seasonal Traffic: most niches experience ups and downs that are completely natural, but you might want to isolate what you can do to capitalize on the highs, and bolster the lows.
2. Topical Interest: trends and events are going to stimulate public interest in certain niches, and while you should try to anticipate these trends/events, you should also have a plan for retaining these users after the fad is over.
3. Posting Frequency: Google likes frequently updated sites, so perhaps your site isn’t being updated often enough — you might want to try adding a blog to it
4. Shifts in Search Rankings: sometimes search engines change their algorithms and sites can lose from their rankings for no apparent reason, but as long as you follow Google’s webmaster guidelines, nothing drastic should happen to your site’s ranking.
5. Poor Quality Content: if your content is relevant to users, they’re not going to come back or link to it, and you’re not going to rank well on Google, so try to keep your content relevant to your target market.
6. Promotional Activities: just cause you build it, doesn’t mean that they’ll come, so a change in your marketing can have a big effect on your traffic; so try different things like using social media sites like Twitter to find users, leaving comments on other blogs and forums, or doing press releases.

Problogger’s post was targeted mainly at bloggers, but Darren is also an very experienced marketer, so his advice is worth considering if you’re trying to understand why your traffic is declining. So check out the original post, because Darren goes into much more detail about these potential causes, and has many more suggestions about what you do about them.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…BAMrollers! This week’s additions to our Big Affiliate Marketing blogroll aim high, and with good intention. They blog because they want to share their wealth of knowledge so you can get wealthy.  Both blogs document projects, and were created just a few months ago–in April and May 2009, respectively. To continue to track their projects, and to stay updated with the other 50-some-odd awesome BAMrollers, download the OPML file on the BAMroll page. They can all be your heros, baby. Already a hero/BAMroller? Get a badge! We hope it matches your cape/site

• Answer Hero blog is the story of the creation of a website called, you guessed: Answer Hero. The keywords of their blog are user-generated content, and the long tail. The keywords of the site are just about everything else…
• Danger Brown is ‘your best friend in affiliate marketing,’ and what’s not heroic about best friends? He tells you his secrets and is easy to communicate with. He gives good advice and is honest…and will introduce you to popular people! This IS what best affiliate-marketing/SEO/social media best friends are for!

I got a real kick out of the article at One Degree this morning about cutting the fat in marketing copy. Author Lynda Partner makes the distinction between just writing (what she calls the “blah blah blah”), and writing marketing content with value.

The theory, one I stand behind wholeheartedly, is that Less is More. Now, that doesn’t mean less work, or less effort. In fact, sometimes creating “less” actually requires more work.

Here are the 10 tips One Degree put together to help you make this transition to writing less, with more content.

1. Start with what your company does and describe your company’s focus in no more than 3 words.
2. Before you start writing your next piece, write a summary using less than 100 words.
3. After you’ve done your summary, go back and highlight the one thing that you want your reader to remember after reading your piece.
4. If your document is going to be more than 500 words, write an outline before you start to keep your thoughts organized.
5. Use simple words. If you make software, say you make software.
6. Once you’ve written your piece, cut at least 1/3 of the words out.
7. For every statement you write, answer the question “what does this mean for my reader”?
8. Find a way to add words that complete this sentence “what this means to you is…..” after every statement you make.
9. Let your words sit before you finalize them. It’s amazing how much easier it is to edit your work after you’ve stepped away from it for a day or two.
10. Go back and chop some more

For a detailed run-down of each of the points as well as some chuckle-worthy expansion on the wrong way to do things, check out the original article at One Degree.

Some affiliates and merchants may not have asked this question, but it’s definitely a good time to start thinking about it. A recent article on Marketing Vox confirms what is already known: Women, in particular, those with children under 18 in the US, spend quite a bit of time on the internet. These US moms devote an average of three hours online every day. Just what are they doing for those three hours? Well, they are logging into email, paying bills, checking the news and weather, as well as comparing prices on products (click to enlarge):

In the past, some of our blog posts on Share Results have highlighted the importance of considering various ethnic communities when it comes to affiliate marketing. MV demonstrates that a web and mobile user’s gender and ethnic background is highly important, as the same article cites that “60% of moms use text messaging, and African-American moms and Hispanic moms text more than Caucasian moms.”

Read More…

Meta information is used to categorize and label web pages. Although it is not the end-all-be-all of search engine optimization (SEO), it is very important to the extent that it determines how sites are indexed by search engines and listed on the search engine result pages (SERPs). When your affiliate pages have the proper meta information attached to them, you are likely to get more organic traffic because your pages are more likely to (1) show up in relevant search results, (2) have the appropriate listing information when they do, and (3) experience higher click-through-rates (CTR).

Title Tag

This piece of information is simply the title of a webpage. The title tag should be used to describe the page it is actually for. It appears in two places that can affect how users convert:

1. At the top of a browser window.

2. As the title of a search engine result.

There are two negative implications when your title doesn’t actually reflect the page that it is for: (1) you rank less effectively in the SERPs, and (2) users can become suspicious when their on that page.

Meta Description

The meta description is what generates the description in the SERPs (see screenshot above). However, search engines only read the first 140 characters. It’s important, then, to include in those first 140 characters information that you think is relevant to users searching for keywords that pertain to the page in questions. Think of it as a sales pitch: there should be descriptive information, product highlights, and anything else to encourage users to click through.

Meta Keywords

This set of meta info pertains to keywords that are pertinent to the page. Essentially, here you want to include the search queries that you believe are most common for users that might be looking for a page like the one you’re tagging.

Some people, however, don’t see this as an important field, and suggest ignoring it for two reasons: (1) the major search engines stopped indexing this field a few years ago, and (2) it tells your competitors what keywords you’re trying to rank for.

You may have noticed that Google features a variety of results, such as news, images, and video on the main search engine results pages (SERPs). This is know as “blended” or “universal” search, and these multi-media results can be used to your advantage – for at least some keywords, anyways.

When multi-media results show up in the SERPs, users’ eyes are often drawn to them first, simply because they stand out. While thumbnails of images and videos are obvious lures, news results seem more objective and credible than normal sites, and blogs offer the allure of interaction.

There are two things you should to consider in leveraging blended search results: (1) what keywords you’re trying to rank for, and (2) producing content in a relevant search vertical.

Selecting Keywords for Blended Search Optimization

Chances are that you won’t be able to rank for any keyword on a blended search that you’re not already ranking for on a regular search. When choosing keywords, then, you have to consider how competitive the keywords you want to rank for are within each search vertical.

Don’t think that a keyword isn’t competitive for blended search just because there are no blended search results. The lack of multi-media search results might just be Google deciding that results from various verticals are not relevant to the average user. For example, a Google search for “online casino” probably won’t return any blended results because a user searching for that keyword is more likely looking for a type of product rather than any broad number of things.

Before trying to optimize for blended search, then, (1) consider the keywords you want to rank for and whether Google might be likely to display blended results for them, and (2) run those keywords through each of Google’s independent search verticals to determine their competitiveness. In the end, you’ll have much more success ranking in blended search for keywords that you already rank for.

Creating Vertical Content

Obviously, if you want to rank on blended search, you have to rank within various search verticals, which means you have to produce content for each of those verticals. As far as search verticals go, the best search verticals to target are news, blogs, images, and video.

• News: There are two way to produce news content: First, get actual news media coverage, Secondly, issue press releases through major online newswires such as PR Web – but be sure to read the newswire’s FAQs so that you can prepare a quality release that will rank better.
• Blogs: Start blogging about your niche, and don’t be a shameless self-promoter about it. Rather, blog from a perspective that you think your visitor would actually appreciate.
• Images: There are two ways to search optimize images. First, use appropriate keywords to re-name all the images on your site and add title and alt tags. Second, upload additional images to popular image hosting sites, tag them according, and then embed those images in your blog posts, making sure to add title and alt tags to the HTML embed code.
• Video: optimizing video content for blended search is like optimizing images. Simply upload your videos to popular hosting sites, tag them appropriately, and embed them on your blog, adding title and alt tags.

Blended Search Traffic

Organic traffic can be an immensely powerful source of revenue. After all, users regard organic search results as more credible than sponsored results.

By leveraging blended search strategies, you can not only increase your click-through-rater from the SERPs, but also other sources of traffic. After all, by producing content across a variety of verticals, you’re engaging users across several new channels.