How would you approach marketing a white hat site with the tools we have?

dxszzcylm

I have a handful of autoblogs. Make me a few bucks. Have a couple white hat sites make me a few bucks. Nothing astronomical here.

I was poking around today and came across a sweet search term with (supposedly) 10,000 to 15,000 monthly searches. Numbers are probably wrong but it is likely more than 100 monthly. Looking on the surface it should take me all of a month to hit page one. If I am correct based on surface information I should be able to milk this for years to come and have already applied for a nice affiliate program.

My concern is tossing in a straight affiliate link. I figure Google won't like that to the point that it will hinder my ranking. I need to hide the fact this is an affiliate site but I also don't want to go the other extreme and make this a blackhat site.

I'm really thinking about using the Grey Hat plugin assuming it works with WP 3.0. Haven't checked yet. See there are just so many tools here I've lost track. I also have no problem buying a new tool or two.

I really need to at least conceal the affiliate link. How would you go about working this site?

dxszzcylm

If youre mainly worried about the aff link why dont you just cloak it? Should be doing that anyways.

dxszzcylm

Could you suggest a good method for cloaking? The one I used to use turned out not to do too good of a job.

dxszzcylm

Ive been using ninja affiliate plugin as it tracks clicks and makes it easy to add links etc.. Before then was just using simple php redirect.

What did you use before?

dxszzcylm

Firestorm - the best way of looking not like an affiliate is by first stuffing the visitor with your affiliate link, then you send them DIRECTLY to the checkout for that particular product.

The whole point of Google not liking affiliate pages, is because you aren't the END result the user was looking for. They want to get the user what they want with the least # of clicks... Affiliate sites suck (in the eyes of Google) because they send them to ANOTHER product page after the one they were just on (your affiliate site), and THEN they have to go to the checkout page. So what you do is stuff them, then send them directly to the checkout page for that product (which you can FRAME on your site, so the user buys the product and never leaves your site).

dxszzcylm

I use GoCodes Wordpress plugin - it just redirects with a pretty url instead of an ugly aff link. I suppose Google just follows it anyway so not convinced it makes much of a difference to the problem. Doesn't the standard php redirect act the same way? Google must be able to follow it? I'd like a better way also if possible.

dxszzcylm

Unless you are cloaking the links so Google/whatever bots go somewhere else on your site - it won't matter how you redirect the links. It's still considered an affiliate site.

The only other way would be to stuff the affiliate link like I already mentioned..

Or just become a trusted authority (by getting lots of high pr links and by having domain age, ie. several years).

dxszzcylm

arceny - That's exactly what i am looking to do, can you explain, or point me in the direction of the best way to stuff the affiliate link and then send them straight to the order page

dxszzcylm

Well - There's many ways to stuff the visitors. Do you have TCL? You can buy a script like TCL if you want to control the numbers, stuffing percentage, and/or stuffing based on referrer. If you want to stuff ALL your visitors (and in this case, I'm assuming you do) - you'll just want to put a hidden iframe on the page, that loads your affiliate link, thus dropping the cookie (or you can stuff them with any method you really want to - because in this scenario, you aren't trying to illegitimately "steal" commissions. You're just trying to get paid for your salesmanship - so you could even use a simple img tag that is your affiliate link) . Let's also assume you are promoting a clickbank product.

First thing you do is make sure all visitors to your blog are getting stuffed (you don't want to send them to the checkout page without having your cookie - otherwise they'll be buying the product from your site without getting you a commission). So add the iframe code (or whatever stuffing method you are employing) to the bottom of the sales page you created. Make sure the cookie is getting dropped by visiting your page (clear your cookies, and visit your page - if you now have a cookie from the merchant, it worked).

Next - find out what the URL is of the checkout page for the product you are promoting is. This is usually pretty easy - just visit your affiliate link, click the Buy Now button or the Checkout button, and copy down the checkout page URL. (some merchants/sites use a dynamic page for the checkout and this makes it a little harder to get a checkout page url. For some merchants there are urls you can use to get to the checkout page of a particular product, and for others, it's not as easy. you'll just have to do some research). Now, you'll want to create a page on your site, that is just framing this checkout page. Create a "checkout.html" page and put a framing code similar to this - in the html:

1. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "‐//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head><title>Product Name - Checkout Page</title> <meta name="description" content="Write your description here." /> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc." /> </head> <frameset rows="100%,*" border="0">
   
2. <frame src=" http://theproductsite.com/the-checkout-page-url-goes-here.php" frameborder="0" />
   
3. <frame frameborder="0" noresize /> </frameset> </html>

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Now you can use that page as your checkout page link. It will go to the merchant's site's checkout page for that product, but it will look like your site since's it's using a 100% frame.

That's really it. The user visits your page. Get's your affiliate cookie placed in their browser. When they go to buy the product, this will skip teh merchant's landing page, go directly to the checkout page which appears like it's on your site.

I'm not sure how much this adds to the "trust factor" of a site. Or if this really makes Google/other SE's really think it's not an affiliate site. Just an idea I had, and have actually done it before. It's good to do, from a user's standpoint - when a clickbank product has a really shitty sales page. If you find a good product on clickbank, it's like 50/50 that they have a good sales page. Most are crap. So this way, you can create your own salespage, and increase the # of conversions since they aren't turned off by the crappy sales page that makes it look like a shitty product.

dxszzcylm

Thanks Larceny, it gave me an insight about Cookie stuffing (im a newbie on that).

Very informative!


I might try to signup @ email form for TCL... I was always afraid to try TCL cause of the lack of knowledge in stuffing


But i was wondering, what if the affiliate marketing owner checks ur site and sees the iframe which drops the cookie..?

dxszzcylm

Larceny, thanks for the detailed explanation, it is clickbank product that i want to do this with and i was hoping there was a simple little script around that would achieve the result.

I'm sure i've got something in php that drops the link (from Amish Shah i think) and then i can just set up a redirect to the order page.

I'll come back to this when i've not hit the Jack quite so hard.