Dominating a Niche in Affiliate Marketing

David Wilson made a post over at Social Media Optimization (a blog I frequently visit now that AMWSO has started offering social media consulting services), talking about the approach used by one SEO for reputation management, I felt that many of the same principles can be applied to affiliate marketing toward dominating the search results for a particular niche. Why be satisfied with simply achieving a high search engine placement for particular keywords. Why not aim for owning 5, or 10 slots, and target that consumer from many angles to definitely make a purchase through your affiliate links.

If you have a site or page targeted toward particular key words within a niche, do you have a Squidoo page to compliment your main landing page?  Have you set-up a blog on a different domain, or a blog hosting service? How about a Myspace page, or Hubpage, or Wetpaint Wiki or PBWiki?

Build up some support pages, interlink them, and dominate the search results in a particular niche.

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Duplicate Content Search Engine Penalties and Affiliate Marketing

Many merchants who run affiliate programs make available content for their affiliates to use on affiliate sites. A common question / concern asked of AMWSO is if this content is being distributed to all affiliates, and multiple affiliates are using the content, will this incur a search engine penalty?  It's a question asked of us both from the merchant perspective, as they redistribute content on their own pages, and also from the affiliate perspective, since the affiliates want to use that content.

First, having a page considered as a duplicate does not earn you a penalty in the search engines. Search engines aim to retrieve the best result for any given search, so if a page is considered a duplicate, it is simply filtered out of the results for that particular search query. Your site and domain do not receive any penalty once this happens. To quote from one source written by SEO expert Jill Whalen:

Reprinting someone's article on your site is not going to cause a penalty. At best, your page with the article will show up in a search related to it; at worst, it won't. No big deal either way.

If you are really concerned about duplicate content, and your objective is to get those pages with the content ranking in the search engines, then Webconfs.com provides an excellent article with tips how to get around the duplicate filters. Steps suggested are as simple as writing a brief editorial around the content, or simply changing the page structure around.

For the merchants out there, don't let the fear of duplicate content filters dissuade you from providing valuable content for your affiliates. After all, these affiliates are working to drive that traffic to your site in the end.

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Search Publishers Welcome at Overstock Jeweler

Overstock Jeweler would like to welcome search publishers and PPC affiliates to join our affiliate program on the ShareAsale network.

We have a variety of tools for search publishers to succeed in marketing our designer inspired jewelry including out Top 30 converting keywords list each month from all of our highest revenue generated keywords from the major search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN, as well as Ask and AOL.

Moreover, for a select number of search partners, we will allow limited trials of using OverstockJeweler.com in the display URL of your PPC ads, provided that you are exclusively promoting our merchandise and driving traffic direct to Overstock Jeweler. For more details regarding our flexible PPC policies, custom 10% discount coupon codes to use in your ads, and search publisher tools, please contact the affiliate manager at allen [at] partnercentric.com.

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