Radium

Recently I have been working with clients on their affiliate marketing programs and it dawned on me that many of the skills that make affiliate marketers successful could be appropriately applied to search marketing (both paid and organic) professionals.

What makes a good affiliate marketer?
Here are 3 strategies that you can employ to become better at search marketing.

We all know that Google doesn’t like paid links and encouraging natural links is the future of SEO. But, for many websites natural links are hard to come by and often have poor anchor text associated with them. So what is a company supposed to do to encourage people to link to their website? Well, you could spend time building value for users or you could simply give away your offering for free in exchange for an inbound link.

Advanced web ranking's free offer.

Recently I came across a great article on Search Insider on why your website doesn’t deserve to be #1 in organic search results. The premise is simple – before taking on a new client, ask them to tell you why their website deserves to be #1 in search results.

The answer can be quite telling. Maybe this client has an amazing product that is better than anything else on the market. Or, maybe they produce content that is 10 times better than any of their competitors. Or maybe, just maybe, their website is exactly like their competitors.

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard of Google Caffeine, Google’s next generation infrastructure. According to Google:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

This is one of those super easy SEO tips that doesn’t require a lot of time and can easily increase your organic search rankings for specific search phrases. Geared primarily at blog posts, this can be applied to general pages on your website, although I’m assuming your main pages are already optimized for search .

The setup
Often, you’ll write an article, get a little exposure (maybe even some RT love on twitter) and then forget about the article and move on to the next topic. But search engines don’t forget and people will start to discover your website through the normal course of search. Sometimes, through good planning (or shear luck) you’ll find you have a real winner on your hands – a blog post that is reaching a lot of new visitors through organic search. While this in itself is great news, you may be able to increase the amount of visitors by making a small change to your title tags.

If you’re running a paid search campaign that includes keywords you rank well for organically, you need to be careful that your paid search campaign isn’t generating sales at the expense of organic search. Cannibalization occurs when a user that would have clicked on your organic listing clicks on your sponsored ad listing. Because you pay on per click basis, a free click is now costing you money.