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Marketing > Affiliate Marketing
"Search Engines BAN affiliate links!"
By Eric Owens, VP of Business Development - NameStick.com
A question that I frequently hear from my clients is: "Do I really need to have my own domain name to get my distributor or affiliate link listed in the Search Engines?"
The one word answer is 'YES.'. First, many search engines are 'truncating' distributor & affiliate links (reducing them to the basic link, which is often the company website minus the your distributor or affiliate code), or even worse... search engines are banning affiliate links, and blacklisting subdomains of the parent company that contain certain obvious characters that are not obviously part of the base site.
Second, a very common practice is for your visitors to just 'cut off' or remove the affiliate code from the end of your link and just go directly to the parent company and 'bypass' your rightful commissions.
The parent company still gets the same number of sales, but your commissions go untracked.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to overcome this.
NameStick
As a network marketing distributor and affiliate, there are a number of reasons why having your own domain name is a must:
1) When you have your own domain name, the address of your web site will be of the form
http://www.EasyToRememberName.com.
On the other hand, if your website is just a company replicated website on one of the free servers, the address of your web site will be something like
http://affiliatesite.com/cgi-bin/12345/IMakeMoneyOffYou.htm
Which of these two sounds more professional?
Which of these two is smaller and is easier to remember?
Which of these two would you click on?
2) The only way to make money online is to build up credibility with your prospects and customers.
Having your own domain name is the first step in doing that. Your customers will feel more comfortable buying whatever it is that you are selling if you have your own domain name. It makes your customers feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with some fly by night operator.
3) When you have your domain name, you can have multiple email aliases of the form alias@yourcompany.com.
This allows you to assign different email aliases to different functions, all of them pointing to your actual email address. Hence, for example, for questions related to the products and services that you sell, you can have an email address like sales@yourcompany.com. For questions related to the newsletter that you publish, you can have an email address like editor@yourcompany.com. For comments/suggestions about your web site, you can direct your customers to
feedback@yourcompany.com or webmaster@yourcompany.com.
Having different email addresses for different functions not only makes it easier for you to filter your email using your email client program (Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express etc.), but also gives your customers the impression that yours is a large, established company with whom it is safe to do business.
4) Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular domain.
So, other factors remaining the same, a home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you submit your long, obvious affiliate link, your index.html page is the home page of your site, but not of that domain. In these search engines, your site will find it very difficult to make it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some of the really competitive keywords. Just think of the amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens.
5) Many major search engines are now refusing to spider the web sites that contain obvious affiliate coding.
For instance, a link that includes these characters backslashes, cgi-bin, and affiliate numbers or usernames, would, until recently, have got the infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your site if you tried to submit your site to AltaVista.
While AltaVista now says that 'your URL has been submitted for processing' if you try to submit your site, rest assured that it will not spider any site obviously belonging to affiliate programs any more - even if it says that your site has been accepted. Can you afford that?
6) You will also find it very difficult to get an affiliate link listed in a major directory like Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! will never admit that it won't add a commercial site which is hosted by an affiliate program, in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get your site listed by Yahoo!. Listing your site with Yahoo! is difficult enough even when you have your own domain. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.
If you do not currently have a domain name to promote your affiliate program, are you convinced that you need one right now?
The small fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is peanuts compared to the benefits that you get. You can check out the availability of domain names and register new domains at
NameStick
You can now also customize the Title, Keywords and Description tags for your domain. This gives you advanced search engine optimization for higher search engine rankings. Almost all affiliate links are NOT indexed by any of the major search engines. NameStick Domains are.
© Eric Owens
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