Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Garth, These are all great options listed, and I'm sure there are more that you can explore (don't forget Gemini, Yahoo's native advertising platform). I would like to briefly touch though on the part of your post where you mentioned that Google is too expensive. Do you have an experienced person managing your PPC efforts? There are many things that could be contributing to the expense of your Google campaign. If you haven't looked into having a third party review your campaigns, I would highly recommend it. (but don't have Google look, they just want you to spend more money.)

Hi Gareth, Most email companies function on a monthly fee, which then is factored in how many emails you send per month through them. Many companies choose to separate out their transactional emails and their marketing emails to keep costs down. Some great ESPs out there: MailChimp, My Emma, Blue Hornet, StrongView, and Marketo, just to name a few.

Thanks guys

Thank you!

Rajiv, In GA are you looking under Goals or Events? Go to Behavior ---> Events. Do you see anything there? And are you sure people are clicking those buttons? That landing page is massively keyword stuffed. If it works for you then fine, but if you're having trouble ranking I would look into drastically reducing keyword use on the page. Good luck!

Edward, No worries, you can integrate their tracking code into your website as well without using a plugin.

Hi Tom, I read your blog post on this. Very helpful. Just wondering though, why use Majestic to download a massive list of links? Wouldn't Moz do the same thing? And Moz even allows you to filter out those that do not pass value? Wouldn't that be a way to have Moz sift out a much smaller list that in theory would include all the affiliate links? As they should not be passing value because they are paid links?

You'll probably have to Google two at a time. Most reviews are straight up comparisons.  I would suggest starting with: Max Bounty vs. Max Bounty vs. Neverblue Max Bounty vs Clickbooth Neverblue vs Clickbooth To be honest, I don't mind CJ but I know people have had their ups & downs with them. Peerfly gets a LOT of support from 2012-2013 but everything since has been negative so I'd avoid.  MB, NB & CB are the go-tos for the pros I know.

I've been doing affiliate marketing since 2000 - when it really was a good solution for banner space (those things that used to get clicks) from smaller publishers long before a thing called Google came around. Now, candidly, I see it mostly as a pathway for parasitic marketing - with little to no benefit to you. Coupon and deal-site Affiliates will bid on your trademarks (even if you prohibit it) - and fight for your own organic SEO.  Now, depending on what you sell, you might like getting a bunch of traffic from someone like retail-me-not, but keep track of how many customers are 'new' versus saw your coupon box and search for a coupon - used it for a discount, and then you paid a commission for that sale...? For us, we do it - but we try to focus on review sites; odd-sites where you never know where the traffic comes from; and then yes, discount and coupon sites - because we get more new customers than for what we eat on customers (I call it "round-tripping") being on your site, finding a discount code box, and then searching the web for a deal.

Resurrecting this thread. Anyone have info on connecting an OTA feed to Google Hotel Finder. It seems that Booking.com has the run of GHF and my company would like to get in on that? All thoughts/ideas are appreciated.

I want to be sure I understand your question correctly. Are you saying you want a tool that will tell you who your competitors' affiliates are so you can poach the best ones? I don't know of a tool that does that, sorry.

Thanks again to Ryan and Cyrus for chiming in. I'm going with: noindex,nofollow all HTTPs pages (they're not in the index anyway) Pull canonical tags from all HTTPs pages 301 redirect affiliate id links to HTTPs version of the page Now, I just need to remember all of this when we finally get to transferring the site fully to HTTPs.

Hi there, Depending of the product Amazon has one of the best affiliation programmes. Regards

Keep nofollowing your links everyone - eventually we'll break Google!

In my opinion, you'll need to work on both. But I'd start with whomever has the highest amount of domain authority and/or traffic first. But the most likely case is that people will find out about your B2B app from the Shopify / Bigcommerce / 3dcart sites. The fact that your app is listed there creates a lot of trust and confidence, and is likely the first place that people who have that type of shopping cart system will start to look. I'd make sure that you upload as many screenshots, content, etc, and try to get great rating on these sites first. Your corporate site, though, is the place that people who really want to know more about your company, before they purchase the app, will then go. Your corporate site, though, is less likely to have as a high a domain authority... but you can help reinforce the app listed on the shopify / big commerce / 3d cart sites with strong content and links directly to those pages. I hope this helps! -- Jeff

Contrary to what authors want to see and what Google says, the Google algos are not very good at ranking the content owner's website first in the search results.   Instead, optimization and strength usually win. Like you, I really dislike that. Lots of affiliates are really good at optimization and they often have strong websites.  They also like to use the text of the affiliate program's website instead of writing their own.  The more affiliates republish your content the more likely you are to rank poorly. So, you can either live with this and enjoy the sales that the affiliates produce or you can be a hardass and refuse to pay any affiliate who uses your content.   If you do that a lot of affiliates will start promoting your competitor's products. If you tell affiliates that they must rel=canonical their pages to your website then their pages will not rank in the SERPs.  Many of them will quit your program the moment you demand that. When you recruit affiliates you can get really smart people to go up against your competitors... but at the same time there will be some damage done to your own direct sales.  It boils down to this....   When you hire mercenaries, they are going to run the battle on their terms or cross over to your competitor.  You will be hit with some friendly fire.

I agree with others, and would disavow before it causes you issues.  That is the safest way to protect yourself.

I like your idea, and I think the fact that you are proactively looking at potential situations speaks volumes.  Having said that, my best advice would be the following: 1.  Make sure that you create unique content on your new site that does not overlap or duplicate anything on the current site.  The user experience should be entirely different between the two sites. 2.  Do not create links or banners all over the new site linking back to the other site.  Something thoughtful is fine, but tread lightly.  Powered by www.ClassicMuscle.com in the footer might be ok, but no guarantees. If you create something of merit, there will be loads of value created in the lead gen department without relying on people clicking on links or ads.  The community will tell you what they want, and if you actively moderate it, I suspect you will find a lot of business.