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I have not use adwords for promoting content. Have you tried Outbrain or Taboola?

This is very helpful I appreciate it.

Completely agree with every point Tom made here.

No problem! Affiliate marketing is a space that could really use something that shakes the current landscape up. I'd say nearly all affiliate marketers are great, and very helpful (and affiliates are too valuable a lead source to ignore either way), but some elements of the way the space works attracts less-than-aboveboard players. I've seen great value from affiliates, even when we were constantly fighting the coupon skimmers. One last thing that may or not be applicable - not all companies that use affiliates even offer a coupon, but affiliates will still advertise {{company}} coupons. My current company does this. This makes it a bit easier to keep an eye on the skimmers, since I just added a line to our policy stating that affiliates may not advertise coupons, whereas the only thing you can really do about skimmers when you do have a coupon is make sure they aren't bidding on branded search terms or using your trademark in their root or subdomain name.

Thanks, I figured that was the case. I am glad I asked.

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

Sure, you can absolutely create brand pages and from there branch to product pages. A bigger site is more effective and easier to maintain and promote and analyze than multiple small sites.

That does help Thomas, and I would add that I see the benefit of a forum for community building. In some instances I think forums could be a huge benefit. What I am seeing on the forum that we manage is a smaller and smaller number of users asking questions and starting topics. We still get a good number of eyeballs checking out older posts though...  lots of lurkers. Many questions that used to end up on the forum are now being directed to live chat, facebook, blog comments, etc. In general most forums I see feel very outdated to me, so I am wondering if anyone has seen any great examples of what they would consider more "modernized versions of forums that are successful?

Hi, we are using MOZ to monitor errors and warnings. It helped identify some issues we didn't know that we had in terms of some duplicate meta data. The biggest error or warning that is still an issue is the number of links on some of our pages. Anyway, we actually have only had MOZ now for about 4-5 months out of the time frame I described. We have seen some improvements. Our conversion rate has improved slightly and we have also seen less cart abandonment as a result of some of the changes we made to our sites. Traffic wise things are a little harder to address. On one level we are seeming to have more "new" visitors to our sites but our overall traffic is down. This is a little misleading though as our spokesperson has also started to take a step back as she nears retirement, so we have had much less major media appearances, etc. It does seem as though we are doing a little better in search rankings for some of our keywords though.

Thanks Takeshi, you make some valid points. Makes sense to me.