SEO Shadow

If you’ve played the affiliation game long enough, you’ve probably tried your luck with a product review site of some sort. It’s the definitive choice for affiliate beginners, yet it still offers untold riches for those who’ve seen everything in the business and know how to capitalize accordingly.

Product review sites are popular because they’re viable for even the laziest of web entrepreneurs, and they don’t take an Indian summer to setup. They also cut out a lot of the middle researching groundwork. If you’re going to build a site dedicated to one product, you better know that product inside out with a comprehensive understanding of your market. Anything less is like walking in to the abyss of chance affiliate marketing. You might get lucky and crack a few sales, but you’re more likely to walk away with a sore head and no return on your investment. Pounds for pennies, if you will.

Hell, you’ll probably stumble back to Digital Point pleading for tips on your first sale and posting a big fat screen grab when you finally cash in on your hours of hard work. I wouldn’t dare knock it. We’ve all started somewhere and just like many - it took me a fair amount of experimentation and late nights glued to the blue to stumble upon a formula that worked.

When I speak to people looking to make a sustained second income on the Internet, I usually advise them to get started on a product review site.

These are absolutely perfect for learning the ropes and understanding the basic principles of what sells and what draws traffic to a site. Better yet, you can set up your site on Wordpress or Blogger and be up and running in minutes.

I’ve explored many avenues for presenting my affiliate offers. From the bespoke website with 100% unique structure and content, to hosted Wordpress blogs and Squidoo hub pages. The truth is, it really doesn’t matter. I use Wordpress to publish my content. It’s quick, it’s optimized for the search engines and it’s easily manageable.

If you’re looking to break in to the product review segment of affiliate marketing, you might take interest in this tip. If you’re already successful, well, it might get you thinking about how you can implement the technique elsewhere.

My advice is to go viral.

Viral is such a buzz word in 2008. I fucking hate it but it’s true. People don’t trust the traditional review site anymore, and why should they?

Some of these product review sites out there are about as discrete with their intentions as Arrington is with his Twitter. If I were a consumer, and I stumbled across a review site showering praise on a heap of products that I hadn’t heard of before, telling me to buy them with special discounts, I’d immediately suspect the legitimacy.

Of course, when you’re in the affiliate marketing business, you grow terribly skeptical of all reviews - both from trusted sources and whatever dot com. It’s important to separate the consumer mindset from the salesman mindset.

Recently, I’ve adopted a tactic which has served me so much better than the biased review approach, I’ve been teasing the urge to bin my old projects in disgust. It’s simple and it’s subtle.

You write without trying to sell, and let your “customer reviews” do the talking.

What do I mean by customer reviews? No, not those god awful testimonials that you read for shits and giggles. I mean busting open the commenting functionality on Wordpress and spamming the hell out of your own blog (no, it’s not practiced here!).

Web 2.0 has reached the melting point where consumers are increasingly relying on the reviews of fellow customers and word of mouth. Established review columns are no longer as appealing. Why take one opinion when you can take fifty?

When you post your product review, stick to the facts. Get rid of the sales talk and promotional garbage about how the consumer simply has to have the greatest invention of the twenty first century. It won’t wash with the savvier audience of 2008. You should STOP reviewing the product and START describing it.

Keep all bias out of the equation and reel off a list of facts about what’s included with the purchase. We’re talking company information, a list of the features, the history of the product, when it was released and what the manufacturer is hoping to achieve with it. Forget those stupid product rating icons. 10/10 and 5 stars are lovely if your brand is worth a sniff of a shit.

The key is to remain completely neutral and come across as an independent party with no affiliate connection. We’ll still hype the product to the moon, but we’ll do it in our comments section.

It’s easy to spam your own blog. That’s a fact, folks.

Those of you with split personalities are gonna love this because you’ve now got the chance to create some make-belief blog commenters and explore as many different shoes as you can feel comfortable in. Take ten minutes to jot down the key selling points of the product. What would the consumer be concerned about?

Got it? Now start commenting on your review under the guise of different names and aliases. Don’t go overboard with the positive praise. A lot of the time, the consumer is simply looking for assurance that the product is legit and not a scam. Especially with the sales pages that they can expect to find on Clickbank (”take my money, just take it”).

Mix up the comments with a few neutral reviews, and maybe the odd pissed off rant which will surely be overlooked if you sugar coat it in enough positive viral buzz.

Now what you have is one informative and non-biased review, and a whole host of positive feedback snippets from your “customer readers”. Just think Amazon, with a hidden agenda! After all, what would you rather trust? A review that praises a product you’ve never heard of to the moon? Or an overview of features and glowing praise from satisfied customers? Better yet, we can use our blog comments to further optimize for keywords (it’s great for the long-tail) without having to ruin the tone of the original article.

Product review sites will always be a popular entry point for affiliate newcomers. But it doesn’t matter how much experience you have. Some simple consumer logic will go a long way to making your site pay.

Fresh from our look at Black Hat affiliate bombing, I thought I’d take things back to basics and focus on some squeaky clean White Hat traffic optimization techniques.

Now when I say White Hat, I cringe a little bit inside. The truth is, these ideas shouldn’t even be classified one way or the other. They should be seen as good business sense.

The more you know about your target market, the better equipped you are to sell to it.

Lets drill that thought in to our heads before we go any further. Making a sale doesn’t have to be rocket science, but you’ll find your chances of converting become infinitely greater when you know just who in the hell you’re targeting.

The problem with selling on the web is that it’s a faceless, all-too-typically linear experience. If I want to sell a dieting package, for example, I have to design with all segments of the market in mind. Not to get too complicated, but there are many differences in the way that I’d promote a dieting product for women (looking good, medical concerns, staying healthy…) and the approach that I’d take when selling to men (chicks love it, optimal performance, good for sports…).

Selling is about appealing to the needs of the customer. We have to cut out the crap and get to the root of what they want. And if they NEED it, well, that makes selling a dream.

So looking at the web, what tools do we have at our disposal?

1. Referring URL

Every time you click on a link, the referring URL gets passed on. This doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own. But when you consider that it’s possible to capture the exact search term somebody used to reach your page, the possibilities are endless. What if we could dynamically adjust our content to match the user’s needs as given away in the search string?

Take this referring URL for example:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheap+dieting+products+for+men

What can we say for sure about our customer with this piece of information?

• It’s a man.
• He wants to diet.
• He doesn’t want to spend a lot of money.

Using some basic logic and PHP knowledge, we serve up the three cheapest dieting products in our database. We then call on the men keyword and dynamically alter our image references to display only pictures of male six packs and world famous athletes. And if it’s a woman searching? Land your pitch with photos of successful businesswomen, slim adored housewives and health conscious imagery.

We can go as far as serving different snippets of copy that are written specifically for one audience over another.

Split testing is fundamental to any successful affiliate campaign. But it doesn’t always reveal the true facts of your marketing success (or failure) – why? It’s because we’re altering the entire shape of a website when we split test. Either this works or that works, but we never think about who it works for. We could potentially be missing out on dozens of sales. The real success lies in handling the variables that matter to each segment of our target market.

2. Geographical IP mapping

Welcome to the next big thing in Internet marketing. I say that, but porn websites have been making a dime on this information for years. It’s only recently that more orthodox websites have started to catch on.

Every time you visit a website, your IP is logged. If you’ve spent any time meddling with analytics software, you’ll be well aware that geographical data for our visitors is stored. This makes it possible to see not just where our traffic is being referred from, but where in the world that user actually is.

If you’ve visited any dating or adult sites recently (hey, it ain’t a crime to look), you’ve probably bared witness to one of the most effective marketing strategies of the last two years. And you probably didn’t even notice it.

Sign up now to chat to Jessica, 18 years old from YOUR TOWN HERE!

When you visit the page, your IP address is mapped to the nearest city and displayed as Jessica’s hometown. Caught between star gazing at the fine young woman and wondering whether she lives just down the street, it’s easy to see how some non-tech savvy users could be persuaded in to signing up under the pretences of getting some action tonight.

Now, this is only one example of how IP mapping can be used to focus a product or service on the consumer’s needs. I can see this technique becoming extremely popular in mainstream Internet marketing although it’s still very much in the primitive stages as far as your average affiliate website is concerned. Conjures some creative possibilities, don’t you think?

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Alright, guys. I’m gonna run you through a technique that I’ve used for the mass production of Black Hat affiliate websites. The beauty of this trick is that it’s actually quite lateral in its scope for use. You can take it as far over to the dark side as you want, but it’s equally rewarding to modify it for your White Hat projects.

I’m going to cover the White Hat side in the next post. For now, we’re going to veer in to some deep end Black Hat SEO.

The Black Hat essentials

We’re going to need a content generating script or some kind of mechanism to rewrite chunks of text. Now, as you’re probably aware, quality rewriting softwares are few and far between on the web. Thankfully, we don’t need something that’s going to read like a white paper. We just need to slot our pages in Google’s index and let them grab some keyword traffic.

We also need a little PHP experience, or a touch of knowledge when it comes to dealing with referrers and search strings. I don’t have the time to dedicate an entire blog to PHP - or indeed, any other language - but I’m going to trust that you’ll be able to find a script for what we need. It’s foundation stuff.

The root of the problem

What is the number one problem that we’re faced with when trying to sell an affiliate product? Assuming that the product is legit and presented tidily, it’s not about the volume of traffic. It’s about directing the right people to the right offer.

Affiliate websites are generally prone to pitching too many products at too many audiences. The number of web hosting affiliate sites I’ve seen trying to cross-sell bargain shared hosting, alongside private virtual servers and premium packages is enough to make my eyes bleed.

It’s a mistake that new kids on the block make all the time. We dip our feet in the riches of the affiliate pool and try to sell every last offer, every last bargain and every last scheme. The more the better, surely? The greater the chances of success?! Well, no. 

The result is a mish-mash website lacking focus. Mr. Megabucks lands on your pages wanting to buy a dedicated server but catches sight of your shared hosting bargain range. He immediately gets confused and travels elsewhere to splash his cash. If you’d just had a way of knowing that he wanted a dedicated server, you could have drawn his focus to only those offers that were going to make him part with his credit card.

Well, we’re not going to focus on information architecture until the next post, so let’s cut to the chase and address this problem the Black Hat way.

Give your customers what they want (now that’s not very Black Hat!)

Every time somebody lands on your website via Google, the search term they used is logged and accessible in the search string. We can get to this string dynamically and capture the search terms that are bringing traffic to our site.

Great, you already knew that. You’ve had Analytics for the last six months so I should stop patronizing you.

But have you thought about what this information means? You can SEE what the user came for! 

Let’s propose that a user gets to my language product site with the search term cheap discount Italian courses. If the user lands on a page that is promoting premium top-of-the-range Italian courses, it’s likely that his stay will be a short one. You might think about skirting this issue by making a page for cheap Italian courses, a page for premium courses, and a page for just about every other keyword variation.

Feel free, I’ll see you in a few weeks.

What we need is a way to grab that search string and dynamically output the exact offer that our visitor is looking for. We’re so much more likely of capturing their attention and making a sale if we immediately present them with their exact requirements. And here’s how.

Do your market research

We need to set aside an hour and draw up a list of all the keyword variations that correlate to the products we’re going to be promoting. I would suggest you find a niche market which offers a variety of budget offers and premium solutions. Now what are the customers going to be searching for? Using our example of Italian courses, here are some secondary terms to consider.

Cheap, bargain, discount, quality, excellent, best, top, number one, in USA, in the UK

All of these phrases are interchangeable. For example we could have somebody searching for Italian courses in the UK, and another after quality Italian courses.

Now we do some more research. Scout out your market and draw up a list of products that you can promote. Analyze the product and decide for yourself what category it falls in to. Is it a bargain course? Is it an advanced premium package? Is it restricted by location?

Note down the URL of each product and plug it in to a database or a simple holding script.

We want to start drawing direct connections from our keyword terms to affiliate offers.

So I might have a list that looks like this:

cheap italian course  —  http://www.cheapcourses.com/italian-product.php?aff=myaff
italian courses in the uk  —  http://www.ukstudy.com/our-italian-course.php?aff=myaff
quality italian courses  —  http://www.bestcoursesonly.com/premium-italian.php?aff=myaff

Naturally, if you’re using a database, things are going to be looking a little different at this point and you’ll be relying on tables and IDs.

The execution

We’re going Black Hat so the last thing we want to do is pull together a website with endless pages of hand written copy. We just want to grab some content that ranks, spin it a few times, and output it with the same keywords in tact.

Get your hands on a functional content rewriter. It won’t pass you any English Lit exams (and if it does, I’ll be the first in line to pay for it), but as long as it scrambles the copy enough to be untraceable by Google - we’re sitting pretty.

Now the last thing we want to happen is to click Start on our rewriter and watch it go through and replace our keywords with utter nonsense. If I’m rewriting an article to target cheap Italian courses for sale, I don’t want my robot friend replacing the term with, oh I don’t know…easy Italians in corsets for hire. That’s not the kind of search traffic that I’m looking for.

So do be careful when spinning your content and make sure that your key phrases remain in tact. We couldn’t care less how it reads - we just want it to get chomped up by Google’s spiders and thrown in to somebody’s search results.

Now, the clever bit.

Using our PHP script, we place an include on every page and grab the search string as soon as the file is requested. Your visitor isn’t even going to see the content. We simply match up the key phrases that they’ve searched for to get to our site. We scan down our list and match up the most relevant affiliate offer based on those keywords. Now all we have to do is redirect the user to the closest matching offer and send them on their merry way - towards something that we KNOW they’re going to be interested in.

The only way anybody is ever going to find that you’ve been rewriting content is to access the site directly (and who’s going to if we only ever link to it from non-related sites?!). 

Alternatively, if somebody gets to the site using a search term that isn’t in our catch list, we can still send them somewhere generic. Just add a simple else if to the PHP script and sit down in unusual delight that absolutely nobody is visiting your site!

As for Google…well, Google doesn’t get to your site using any search strings. It will simply spider the rewritten mumbo-jumbo content and process it for ranking.

Turbo charged success…with limits.

This is an effective way of busting out websites for quick profit. Don’t expect them to pay your pension many moons from now. It’s incredibly likely that somebody will nark you out somewhere down the road. Of course, the swaying factor of success is that we can produce websites like these in mass volume and send fantastically targeted traffic towards our affiliate offers. It’s fast. It’s effective. It’s downright easy.

In the next post, I’ll be showing you how to convert this method for White Hat websites. I’m sure you’ve already worked out where we’re heading with this one…