Tiered Affiliate Programs

Two-tier affiliate programs allow you to recruit other publishers to sign up for a program through you and promote a product on their own. With this system, you have a chance to earn money even if you are not actively promoting a product yourself. When your second-tier affiliate receives a commission from a sale, you receive a smaller percentage. Although the amount of money earned from individual sales may be small, the effort required to earn money from a two-tier affiliate program is very small.

One-Time Bonus

A one-time bonus with an affiliate program usually kicks in when your lifetime sales total has reached a certain minimum amount. For example, a company might five you a one-time $500 bonus when you have sold $5,000 worth of products in your lifetime as an affiliate. These programs are excellent when you believe that your efforts will produce a small trickle of sales rather than a steady volume each month.

Commission Increase

Creating a Link on Digg

Step 1

Navigate in your browser to Digg.com. If you don’t already have a Digg account, click the “Join” button at the top of the screen and enter your email address as well as your preferred user name and password. If you have an account, click the “Login” button at the top of the page and provide your account credentials. After you log in to your account, the screen displays the current top stories on Digg.

Step 2

Click the “Submit Link” button. This displays a pop-up window with the title “Submit a Story.”

Step 3

Type the URL of the link you want to promote in the “Submit a Story to Digg” field at the top of the window and click the “Check URL” button. Digg automatically fetches the title of the page and displays a selection of thumbnail images.

Step 4

Edit the title of the page if desired.

Step 5

Click the arrows below the thumbnail image to cycle between the images found on the URL you entered.

Step 6

Use the “Description” field to provide a few sentences about the link you are promoting. Avoid using overly promotional language, but make sure that your description will entice users to click.

Step 7

Click a button such as “Technology” or “Business” at the bottom of the window to categorize the link.

Step 8

Click the “Post Story” button to post the link on Digg.

Promoting a Link on Digg

Step 1

Place a Digg button on the page you are promoting. Digg provides the necessary source code that you can paste into the page, allowing readers to digg the link directly from your website rather than visiting Digg.com.

Step 2

Leverage your social media contacts on other services such as Facebook and Twitter to get more Diggs. Encourage your friends to visit and Digg the page.

Step 3

Contact influential bloggers within your niche and tell them about the link you are promoting. The bloggers that enjoy your link and post it on their websites can potentially bring thousands of visitors to your website, many of whom may click the Digg button.

Step 4

Submit press releases about your link. Many agencies syndicate press releases to major online publications. This increases the number of inbound links pointing to your website, which can improve its performance in search engines.

Content Theft Can Happen to You

I’d like to begin by telling you a true story: at the end of 2011, I was given pre-release access to a product that was certain to be a hot seller within its niche. I had a great affiliate program through which to promote the product, so I immediately set to work on putting together a small website explaining every aspect of it. One page of the website was a comprehensive instruction manual — something the product lacked. The website attracted a great deal of traffic and became the Internet’s only true authority site about that product.

However, several months later, something horrifying happened: the Chinese manufacturer of the product decided to take the manual and begin distributing it to American resellers without consulting me. The American resellers, not knowing that the Chinese manufacturer wasn’t the original source of the manual, begin printing the manual and publishing it online.

This could easily happen to you. You might put something online thinking that it’s just another affiliate website, but you never know if that will be the one that really catches on and attracts parasites from all over the world. If you are working on a project that you believe has real potential, register your content with the United States Copyright Office. Why? Anything that you create and publish online automatically has copyright protection. However, the theft of a registered work may entitle you to statutory damages. If the stolen content is unregistered, you’ll have to prove that the theft has damaged you monetarily to receive compensation. Obviously, you’ll want to consult a lawyer about the particulars of your situation before you decide how to proceed.

So, let’s get to work on getting that stolen content offline and removed from search engine results pages.

Web Host DMCA Takedown

The first thing you’ll do is contact the company hosting the offending website. McAnerin International hosts the DMCA takedown notice that you’ll be using as a template. You’ll be sending the host a notice indicating that you expect them to remove or disable access to the stolen content within 24 hours.

1. Download and open the Web host DMCA template.
2. Find out who is hosting the infringing website. Who Is Hosting This is one tool you can use.
3. Find the host’s contact information from their website. If possible, look for an address such as “legal@company.com” or “DMCA@company.com.” Otherwise, use whatever contact information is available. You’ll also need the address and phone number of the Web host.
4. Find the contact information for the website owner who has stolen your content if possible. If the website doesn’t belong to a business and no contact information is available, check the domain registration information using a WHOIS search.
5. Type the Web host’s contact information in the Recipient Information area.
6. Enter your contact information in the Sender Information area.
7. Describe the nature of the content theft in detail. The DMCA takedown template has spaces for you to insert the original text, the infringing text and the URLs on which both appear.
8. Enter the contact information of the person or company who has stolen your content.
9. Save the DMCA takedown template and email it to the Web host.

Google DMCA Takedown

The next step in the DMCA takedown process is to remove the stolen content from Google’s search results pages.

1. Navigate to Google’s content removal page and select the Web Search radio button.
2. Select the I have a legal issue that is not mentioned above radio button.
3. Select the I have found content that may violate my copyright radio button.
4. Select the Yes radio button to indicate that you are the owner of the stolen content.
5. Select the Yes radio button to indicate that you wish to proceed.
6. Identify the type of content stolen and then click the This Form link. This brings you to Google’s DMCA takedown form.
7. Enter your contact information.
8. Describe the copyrighted work in detail. Be as thorough as possible, especially if your page also contains content that wasn’t stolen.
9. Provide the location where Google can find the content that was stolen.
10. Sign, date and submit the form.

In reading this article, I want to stress one key piece of advice: if had a healthy website previously — you enjoyed strong traffic and a decent conversion rate — you shouldn’t go changing things randomly because you can easily make the problem worse. Research thoroughly, find the most likely cause of the problem and set about making changes in a methodical fashion until you find the solution.

Problem: Website SEO Issue

One of my most successful websites is a product review website based on a theme called InReview. The theme converts like crazy but it lacks an option allowing users to see all of the reviews on one page. So, I created a nice table allowing people to sort through every review I’ve published, and linked to the chart in the website’s sidebar. A few weeks later, I noticed something odd; my individual reviews were getting a lot less traffic. When I searched for keywords exactly matching the titles of individual reviews, Google would show me my website’s “All Reviews” page. I added the “All Reviews” page as a service for people who wanted to browse my website’s content without clicking through a lot of pages, but I didn’t think that was the page people wanted to see if their search keywords indicated that they were looking for a specific review. Not only that, but I was losing search engine rankings because the “All Reviews” page wasn’t optimized for the multitude of keywords that the individual reviews were ranking for. It turned out that Google had interpreted the “All Reviews” page as a “View All” page, which they prioritize when indexing content.

Solution: Audit Website SEO, Examine Recent Changes

If your affiliate sales are down because you have lost rankings and conversions due to an SEO problem, you need to audit your website carefully before making any changes. Remember that it can take weeks before you see how an SEO change on your website affects search engine performance, and if you start changing things willy-nilly you may find yourself worse off than when you started. Carefully think about every change you have made recently until you find what you believe could be the problem. Make one change and wait before you change anything else. In my case, I noindexed the “All Reviews” page and within a few weeks, Google started showing the correct results for my keywords again.

Problem: Traffic is Down

You can’t get conversions if you aren’t getting the traffic. If your affiliate sales are down, check Google Analytics to see if your website is getting less traffic than it did previously. If your traffic is down, it’s time to start looking at why. Did you receive a temporary boost by posting about a current event that now receives less search volume? Has the buzz began to cool off after a recent burst of social media activity?

Solution: Post More Great Content

If your affiliate sales are down because you’re no longer receiving a boost from a hot article or post, the good news is that you clearly know how to write for traffic. The bad news is, you’re going to have to do it again. Make the most of those temporary boosts as they happen. In the meantime, focus on writing evergreen content that will generate consistent traffic.

Problem: Google Algorithm Change

Google algorithm changes are scary — you may not know just how scary these changes can be until you’ve watched a website go from a big earner to a complete loser overnight. In the past few months, the Big G has been instituting a major crackdown on over-optimization of inbound links — particularly links excessively targeting specific anchor text. I recently saw an interesting article on SEOMoz about link penalties and how you can identify whether your website is affected. Generally speaking, though, it’s pretty simple — if you’re using a blog network such as Linkvana or building links in any way that allows you to select your own anchor text, Google is targeting you. Pull those links down before it’s too late.

Solution: Optimize for User Experience

The solution here is pretty simple; you don’t have to worry about Google algorithm changes bringing your affiliate sales down if you optimize your website for the best possible user experience. Write high-quality, engaging content that users will enjoy and want to share. One of the most interesting websites I found recently is called CopySean; the author frequently writes about his techniques for maximizing social media engagement to the point where he doesn’t need search engine traffic at all to earn money. Social media recommendations and shares are powerful votes of confidence, and search engines are only going to use it as a ranking signal more in the future.

Problem: Affiliate Links are Broken

I work with a merchant who drives me crazy sometimes. Every couple of months, they make small changes to their products and change the URLs of their product pages without redirecting the old URLs. This is a ShareASale merchant, and I’ve enjoyed great conversions by deep linking to their products. When they change their product URLs, though, my affiliate sales go down the tube because people who click through get a big old 404 error.

Solution: Audit and Fix Broken Affiliate Links

Periodically, you need to audit your affiliate links to make sure that they are active and go to products that are still available. I strongly recommend using a PHP jump script for your affiliate links, as it makes the process of auditing and correcting them much easier — especially if you have multiple websites. Correct one entry in the script and all of the links on the associated website are fixed instantly.

Problem: New Competition

In competitive niches, people launch new websites constantly — and some of them may be more willing than you to break the rules. Some may use blog networks and comment spam to gather thousands of backlinks. Others may buy established domains and convert them to spammy affiliate sites. Some may even steal your content — it’s happened to me. All of these tactics may bring your affiliate sales down temporarily because these spammy websites may displace yours on SERPs.

Solution: Analyze the Competition and Take Action

When I see a new website pop up on Google’s first results page for keywords I usually rank well for, the first thing I do is load up SEO SpyGlass and see where the website’s backlinks are coming from. In most cases, I’ll find that the owner of the website has bought an established domain with plenty of inbound links and is riding a temporary wave of link juice. In this situation, your best bet is to wait; old links from unrelated websites provide little benefit in the long run. In other cases, I’ll find that the website’s owner is using link spam with exact match anchor text. Google provides a way for you to report spam in search results; you have to do this through your Webmaster Tools account, so make sure that your house is clean first. Alternatively, you could take a “wait and see” approach; I’ve never seen Google take action on a specific website reported as spam, but they information you provide could be used in a future algorithm change. If your content has been stolen, Google has a page allowing you to file a DMCA takedown notice, which will result in the removal of the content from SERPs. In the near future, I will be writing a DMCA takedown tutorial that will describe this process in greater detail.

Thanks to Flickr user Jerry Bunkers for providing this article’s lead photo.

Scroll to the bottom of this page to skip the background information and see the instructions for how to nofollow the category navigation links in your WordPress menu bar.

Archives Outranking Posts

When your category or tag archives outrank your posts on a WordPress website, it can lead to two very serious problems. First, if a user lands on a category archive page when he actually wanted to see a post, it means that he still has more searching to do once he reaches your website before he’ll be able to see the information he wants. In this situation, many users will click “Back” and try another website.

More importantly, consider the situation above from a keyword density standpoint; in this situation, your post about troubleshooting problems with the 1999 acme blue widget is probably the most relevant post on your website for a variety of keywords such as “1999 blue widget” and “blue widget problems.” Keywords such as those probably appear multiple times within the post, while they probably appear just once on the category archive page. If Google selects the archive page as the most relevant one to display, you’ll probably rank poorly against other websites because they appear far more relevant to Google than your category archive.

Should You Noindex Your Category and Tag Archives?

A lot of people use plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast to eliminate potential duplicate content issues with WordPress by noindexing items such as category, tag, author and date-based archives. WordPress SEO is a great plugin, but if you’re simply noindexing content as a knee-jerk response when Google displays your category archives instead of your posts, you may not be handling the situation in the best possible way. In my case, I had added lengthy text descriptions to my category archives in an attempt to rank for more general keywords. I didn’t want to noindex my archives, as doing so would make the category descriptions worthless from an SEO standpoint.

Why Category and Tag Archives Can Outrank Posts

Before we move on, one thing I want to mention about WordPress SEO and duplicate content is that you shouldn’t waste your time trying to fix what isn’t broken. In my case, I had a website with a legitimate problem that was causing me to lose search engine rankings, traffic and conversions. None of my other websites had this problem, so there would be no reason for me to add “nofollow” to my category and navigation links.

How can you be certain that your category archives are outranking your posts? Perform several searches on Google with your exact post titles wrapped in quotation marks. If your archive pages appear before your posts, you have a problem. In my case, I believe that the problem had something to do with the fact that the website had a rather extensive category-based navigation system in which some posts appeared under multiple categories. Posts appearing under only one category were ranked properly, while posts appearing under multiple categories were ranked improperly. The fact that every page on my website had do-follow links to every category meant I was sending PageRank to the archives, causing them to appear more relevant to Google than the posts themselves.

Nofollow WordPress Category Navigation

Initially, I looked for a plugin that would add “nofollow” to all of the category links in my website’s navigation bar automatically. It turns out that WordPress already has this ability if you’re using custom menus.

1. Open the Menus screen under the Appearance heading of the WordPress admin menu.
2. Click the tab for the menu you want to edit.
3. Click the Screen Options tab at the top of the page and select the Link Relationship (XFN) check box.
4. Close the Screen Options tab. Each time you click the arrow on the right side of a menu option, you’ll now see a field titled Link Relationship (XFN).
5. Type nofollow in the Link Relationship (XFN) field for each link to which you want to add the “nofollow” attribute.
6. Click the Save Menu button when you are finished.

Researching Keywords With Google Suggest

Google Suggest can help you build a list of hundreds of long-tail keywords in minutes.

Begin by visiting Google. Search for anything and click the Gear button on the results page. Select Search Settings on the drop-down. Click the Never Show Instant Results radio button under the Google Instant Predictions heading. Finally, click the Save button at the bottom of the page. Disabling Google Instant doubles the number of keywords that Google Suggest will show you.

Return to Google’s front page. Type your primary keyword, insert a space and type the letter “a.” Google Suggest will display as many as ten different keyword suggestions in a drop-down. Back over the letter “a” and type “b.” As you go, I suggest using Excel or a similar program to record all of the keyword suggestions displayed for each letter. Don’t forget to try numbers as well. By using a few different seed keywords, you can get hundreds of different keyword suggestions in this fashion with little effort.

Once you’ve created your list of long-tail keywords, you’re going to want to organize them in some way so you know which keywords you should tackle first. I like to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for this; simply copy the keywords out of Excel and paste them into the GAKT. If you organize the keywords in a single column, each will appear on its own line when you paste them into the GAKT. This way, you can simply paste and click the “Search” button. You’ll then see how many people have searched for each keyword, both within your own country and worldwide. Export the list as a CSV file and paste it back into Excel.

Although the GAKT will not show how many people have searched for certain keywords if they don’t receive consistent search volume, the fact that a keyword appears in the Google Suggest drop-down means someone has searched for it. If you search for some of these extremely long-tail keywords, you’ll probably find that there aren’t currently any good results. If your website has a decent amount of authority, you should easily be able to claim the first position on the results page by providing good content about that keyword.

Using Google Suggest Automatically

Übersuggest finds keywords automatically using Google Suggest.

Admittedly, using Google Suggest for keyword research can get a bit old after you’ve run through the alphabet with a few different keywords. When you get tired of performing your keyword research manually, give Übersuggest a try. This tool runs through the entire process I’ve described above automatically and generates a plain text file that you can easily paste into Excel, the GAKT or another tool.

1. Log in to your 1&1 account using the address and customer number included in the welcome email sent when you created your hosting account.
2. Scroll down to the Communication & Online Storage heading and click the E-mail Administration link.
3. Click the Create button.
4. Enter the desired account name for the new email address in the E-mail address field.
5. Click the drop-down menu next to the field and select the desired domain.
6. Click the drop-down menu next to Type and select Mailbox. This tutorial assumes that you want to create a real, functioning email account that also forwards incoming messages to a central address. If you only want to forward messages but do not need the ability to reply from the created email account, select Forward instead.
7. Type the first, last and display names for the email account.
8. Type the desired password for the email account.
9. Click the check boxes below the password fields if you want to enable 1&1 anti-virus and anti-spam protection.
10. Click the Add button near the bottom of the page to create a forwarding rule for the new email account.
11. Enter the address to which you want to forward messages in the Address field.
12. Click the OK button to create the new email account.

You have successfully created a new email account with 1&1, and messages sent to the account will automatically be forwarded to your main email address.

1. Open a browser and navigate to WordPress.org. Click the blue Download WordPress button, save the file to the location of your choice and unzip it.
2. Log in to your 1&1 account using the link provided in the welcome email.
3. Click the MySQL Administration link in the box titled Domains & Web Space.
4. Click the New Database button.
5. Type a name for the new WordPress database in the Description of the new database field.
6. Type the desired password for the database in the Password and Repeat Password fields.
7. Click the Set Up button.
8. Click the Go to Overview button. Until 1&1 is finished building the WordPress database, this screen will display the phrase Setup Started next to the name of the new database. You’ll need to refresh this screen until it displays the word Ready before you continue. Record the password that you selected when creating the database as well as the Database Name, User Name and Host Name displayed on this screen.
9. 

   Modify these fields in your wp-config.php file.

   Open the folder in which you unzipped WordPress. Right-click the file wp-config-sample.php and select Rename. Change the name of the file to wp-config.php.

10. Open wp-config.php in Notepad++ or another text editor.
11. Add the Database Name, Database User Name, Database Password and Host Name to lines 19, 22, 25 and 28 of wp-config.php as shown in the screenshot on the right.
12. Click this link to open the WordPress Secret Key Generator. You’ll notice that each time you refresh the page, these secret keys change. They are randomly generated and should not be shared with anyone. Copy all of this information and paste it over lines 49-52 in wp-config.php.
13. Save and close wp-config.php.
14. Connect to your 1&1 server with FileZilla or another FTP client and upload all of the WordPress files to the root directory of the domain on which you want to install WordPress. If your 1&1 account has only one domain, upload WordPress to the top directory.
15. Navigate in your browser to mydomain.com/wp-admin/install.php. If you installed WordPress in a subdirectory such as blog, you’ll need to add that to the address. If everything up to this point has been done correctly, you should now see a screen titled Welcome.
16. Type the desired name of your WordPress website in the Site Title field. Like the other items that you will need to enter going forward, you can always change this later from within the WordPress interface.
17. Type your desired login name in the Username field.
18. Type your desired password in the Password, twice fields.
19. Type the desired administrator email address in the Your E-Mail field.
20. Click the check box next to Privacy if you want search engines to crawl and index your WordPress website.
21. Click the Install WordPress button. If everything went correctly, you should now see the message Success.
22. Click the Log In button to log in to your new WordPress installation.

1. Click the link in the welcome email sent by 1&1 when you first activated your account. Enter your customer number and password to log in to the 1&1 Control Panel.
2. Click the Domains link under the Domains & Web Space heading in the upper-left corner of the menu. This screen shows all of the domains currently attached to your 1&1 account.
3. Click the New button above the domain list.
4. Click Add Domain on the drop-down menu.
5. Type the desired domain name and click the Check Domain button. The 1&1 interface checks to confirm that the domain is available, and finds that it is already registered.
6. Click the Point DNS to 1&1 name servers and keep your current registrar radio button.
7. Click Next. The next screen displays a message notifying you that the 1&1 mail servers will be used for your domain. Assuming you aren’t already using the domain, this isn’t a problem. However, if you are already receiving mail on the domain, it is important to note that when you change the DNS information for the domain, some mail may be lost for the next couple of days while the domain propagates.
8. Click Next. The next screen displays the server addresses to which you need to point your domain name on your registrar’s website.
9. Click Order.

Remember that you must change the DNS settings at your domain registrar’s website before you will be able to access it on your 1&1 account. Sometimes, DNS changes propagate almost instantly. Other times, it may take as long as three days.

1. Log in to your 1&1 account using the information provided in the welcome email. This brings you to the 1&1 control panel.
2. Scroll down to the Website/Applications heading and click the Click & Build link.
3. Hover the mouse over WordPress and click the Install Application button.
4. Click the I accept the terms of use check box, and then click Next.
5. Type the desired name for the WordPress blog in the Name field. This is not the same as the blog’s title; this is simply the name that will identify the WordPress blog on your 1&1 account’s list of installed applications.
6. Click the drop-down menu next to Domain and select the desired domain for the new WordPress installation.
7. Type the desired login name in the Administrator’s login field.
8. Type the desired password in the Password and Repeat Password fields.
9. Type the administrator’s email address in the Administrator’s Email field. This will be the main email address attached to the WordPress blog.
10. Type the desired title for the WordPress blog in the Weblog Title field. Like the administrator’s email address, you can always change this later through the WordPress dashboard.
11. Select your language on the Interface Language drop-down menu.
12. Click the Install button to install WordPress on your 1&1 account.

This begins the installation process. During this time, 1&1 automatically installs WordPress on the domain you selected. When this process is complete, you will receive a confirmation email. This may take several minutes.