10 Things Every Affiliate Should do in 2007

http://www.affiliateprograms.com/community/blogs/marketing/archive/2007/01/05/10-things-every-affiliate-should-do-in-2007.aspx
by Dave Friday, January 05, 2007 3:22 PM

Happy New Years affiliate marketers, welcome to 2007! This should be a fantastic year for our industry and online growth as a whole, so here's a few ideas for how to keep yourself growing and earning through the year.

Venture in to new niches.

Don’t be stagnant this new year. There are tons of niches and verticals to choose from. Our program directory can give you a good overview of all the opportunities available to nearly anyone from nearly any background. Looking out to 2007, the leading verticals and opportunities include mobile affiliate programs, financial offers (including credit cards, loans, and payday advance), travel affiliates, business to business (this is a fast growing online vertical, expect big things in ’07), and website services.

Meet more affiliates to partner and collaborate with.

Whether you’re attending internet marketing and web publishing conferences, or simply interacting with other affiliates on forums (like our AffiliatePrograms.com forums), make 2007 the year you collaborate. By focusing on your strengths, and sharing visitors, links, and unique content with other publishers you should be able to achieve greater deep links and better search engine rankings. Also, creating a group of affiliates can help motivate you, as well as provide a group to share 2nd tier links with to help grow all your collective profits.

Integrate more metrics in to your decision making process.

There are literally hundreds of metrics that you can judge your decisions on, but finding a handful of important ones and maintaining a clear idea of your growth is crucial. Find out your inbound searches through your referral reports, and make sure you’re referring customers and spiders to highly targeted, conversion-oriented landing pages.

Test more traffic acquisition options.

Yahoo and Microsoft's Adcenter have finally started to put effective contextual marketing portals in place. Don’t be shy to give them a shot. Furthermore, products like Adbrite 2.0 make it easier than ever to find new ways to get visitors to your website. Make sure to keep a close eye on the varying performance of each of your sources, and try out some 2nd tier networks like Miva or ABCSearch to see what works for your properties.

Grow your email lists.

Emails have been good to affiliate marketers over the years, and there’s no foreseeable reason they’ll slow down in 2007. Grow your list by making sure your visitors can easily and quickly opt-in to your newsletters and email updates. Services such as Feedburner make it easy to publish emails to your blog readers. Keep ‘em coming back, or market directly via email – it hardly matters: just keep growing your email lists. If you want to go a more traditional way, I recommend you check out Campaign Monitor for subscriber management and multiple-property, low-volume, email solutions.

Increase your site’s bookmark-ability.

Add the usual suspects: Digg, Delicious, Furl, Newsvine, and any other social bookmarking links that catch your eye. Including these links really can’t do you much harm, but the potential for getting content indexed by these services is worth the effort. I discovered a really handy java script courtesy of Blifaloo.com that automatically parses the code and adds the links to your pages. Just drop the code in, copy the images to your local, and you’re social bookmark-ready.

Watch domain auctions for bargain domains for your niches.

Most affiliates I’ve met and talked with just need a catchy domain name to spark their creative fires. Using an auction service can help you track down domains with your keyword or phrase that you’re looking for. Personally, I like the features you get from GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket service. For $5 a year, you can buy and sell, as well as setup email alerts when domains with the keywords you’re looking for go up for auction.

Create even more targeted, keyword rich content.

If you haven’t heard us preach about the importance of unique, targeted, keyword rich content, this must be your first visit to AffiliatePrograms.com. Even as the web fragments and becomes ever more robust, there’s still a tremendous value in new ideas and new content. Make sure to set aside a period of time every day to hammer out something, to keep the spiders interested and your visitors informed.

Find new linking partners daily.

Links are the lifeblood of the web. Finding linking partners is as important as producing original content, because without those links in to your content, there’s no way for the search engines to recognize the true value of the content you’re putting forward. Every time you write an article, you should go exploring on the web for potential linking partners, including potentially interested bloggers, webmasters, and forum users. You should also set aside a portion of your budget to literally pay for links to specific articles that you feel can yield a high return on investment over the course of a year.

Browse and explore the blogosphere more.

Blogs are a great way to keep on top of the latest within an industry, category, or topic. Thanks to services like Technorati and Sphere, it’s possible to access a lot of blogs on keyword searches, and really get to the root of the current discussions. Make the time to read more blogs, comment on more blogs, and discuss the latest developments on your own blog. Your participation will pay off with persistence.