On the pitfalls of entrepreneurship in affiliate marketing

It wasn’t quite the virtual Wild West out there when Northern Lights Holding entered the online marketing business, but this company’s entrepreneurial management was certainly flying by the seat of our pants for some time in assessing, adjusting to, and reassessing the tricks of the industry.

The first website Northern created, uploaded and marketed is LiveCasinoDirect.com. As the name would indicate, this website is in the business so common to those entering internet marketing: Online gambling. While the online gambling industry has its own unique marketing ploys and tactics, the lessons learned by our management in marketing LiveCasinoDirect have extended into a burgeoning business that creates and markets ‘sites in other fields as well.

Below, a few basic dos and don’ts on search-engine manipulation, content production and general marketing in the online sphere that we’ve picked up over the years.

•  Remember the eggs and the basket. The old cliché serves as rule no. 1 in internet marketing, as it does so often in day-to-day business. Though you will want to specialize as much as possible on the websites you work (see section entitled “No, really specialize” below) in terms of content and information, you absolutely must diversify your demographic within the interest range as much as possible.

Our salient example came with the blindsiding of a bill squeaked through the American Senate: Nearly utterly unexpected by those in the industry, the so-called Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act threw online casino and sportsbook marketers into chaos, caused two of the biggest game software producers to make their product unavailable to U.S.-based customers, and destroyed more than one year’s worth of our company’s time, resources and work.

Since the potential demographic for our websites was essentially any English-speaking person with a computer interested in playing poker or casino online, you’d think that we’d have covered the non-U.S. market a bit more. Though some of this specific problem could be based on problems with outsourcing (see “Know your outsourcer” below), this one we just had to file under “live and learn.” In this case what we learned (and soon implemented) were techniques to appeal to a wider base, such as creating limited foreign-language content and partnering with companies that appealed to customers outside the U.S.

•  Know your outsourcer. In building/marketing websites, it is common to employ subcontractors, particularly link-builders and content producers.

The appeals of employing link-building specialist companies are obvious: Lots of presence all over the internet fairly quickly coupled with the Google search engine’s recent new emphasis on “authority sites,” i.e. those linked to accepted informational sites, make link-building a cheap investment that can produce good results.

Unfortunately, the link-building arena is hardly devoid of unscrupulous characters. Many such companies perform the task for which they’ve been contracted, but sloppy and hasty work often results, which does the sites you market no good, and may in fact lead to search engine penalties and lower traffic.

The link-builder we used unfortunately violated many tenets of good link-building: Too many directories and websites on which our marketed websites were placed had identical or similar IP addresses; almost all were based on servers in one country, namely the United States which, as mentioned above, destroyed the initial investment when new laws came into effect; and employment of a software program to electronically insert links, which opens all kinds of cans of worms vis-à-vis search-engine marketing.

When you contract a link-builder for work – incidentally, you should also avoid the “500 links for $29.95” shops and look for a job-by-job contractor  – some of the things you should specifically ask for include the following.

o    a specific page rank for any pages on which your link is placed. Try for a page rank 3 or 4, at least;o    relevance of subject matter to your site(s);o    a maximum of links on the page wherein your link will go. Fifteen is a good number here;o    no automated software used in deploying links to webpages; ando    most importantly, the links you pay for must be *permanent*.

Then there are content producers. While most subcontractors in this area appear to be genuine – and in several areas like online casinos and personals marketing, specialist companies do exist for content – the plagiarists and non-native speakers do creep in.

One content provider which we had subcontracted was found to be providing the exact same material to our website as to competing websites, an action that penalizes both websites for duplicate content in online searches. Unfortunately, this went on for some time before it was discovered; the effect was fairly widespread and represented a step backward for LiveCasinoDirect’s development. The lesson here: Employ content-checking tools (many are available for download online) to ensure that your content is unique. Further, one check may not be enough if you suspect tomfoolery. Send old content through that checker once in a while, too.

Content from non-native speakers (or “Chinglish” as it’s sometimes derisively called) might not hurt your website’s performance in search-engine results, but this makes for one heck of a turnoff to potential customers from the U.S. and U.K. who have come to expect top-notch customer service right down to the language.

Luckily, the immediate solution to these problems is simple: Fire the subcontractor! The best solution to nipping these problems in the bud – essentially producing all content in-house – is more pricey, but is the only answer in the long run.

•  Tend that interlink garden! Not only should you be aware of links “dying” on your own websites, you must check those outside sites linking to yours. Pages (and websites) go down all the time, and dead links are a black mark on both origin and destination websites. Act promptly if an old link is no longer working, for whatever reason.

•  Watch that automation! Just as a link-builder who uses software to place your links automatically is not to be trusted, neither is your own use of this technology. While generally it is believed to be advantageous to get “everywhere” on the internet in these days of social networking fever, places like Google Base, forums, Yahoo groups and such can often be more of a problem than they’re worth.When your story is reproduced verbatim in several places on the internet, sure, the readers of that website and the occasional surfer caught serendipitously may read the content, but the original website will not garner any positive movement in traffic and is likely to be penalized in searches.

Also, the major problem with automated mailing lists and automated posting-type schemes is their tendency to resemble spam – and indeed such mindless reproduction of material is in effect internet spamming, blocking the way to the desired information in the same fashion spam email clogs your inbox. In general, beware the newsgroups and go nowhere near automated news articles and those instant press-release services.

•  Stay on topic. Back in the beginning, it seemed like a good idea to post pieces on topics completely outside the sphere – online gaming – in which we were working. And sure, to put up content on outside subject matters may get you one absurd search result once in a while, but what are the odds that a surfer popping in non-sequiturs actually converts to real results?

While there are no hard statistics on just how many players actually go to an online gambling site and spend money after doing a search for casino sites, but surely the crafty online marketer will flood the mainstream search areas rather than be certain to dominate a few terms that are unlikely to see use.

•  No, really on topic. In fact, specialize. Sure, four, five years ago, it was OK to start up a general website appealing to the general consumer on the general topic of internet casino gambling; years of effort and content updates have increased the website’s page rank and traffic to respectable levels. We wouldn’t envy somebody getting in on the ground floor today with such a concept, and all subsequent projects this company has taken on tend heavily to the specific, e.g. slot machines, BINGO, U.K.-friendly casino sites, woman-friendly sites.

Think about it. If you wished to create a website centered on movies, how much interest will a general-interest page with reviews, gossip, funny news, etc., generate? How long before you crack the average movie buff’s bookmark list of reliable names like IMDB.com, RottenTomatoes.com, AintItCoolNews.com and probably 15 others? On the other hand, UFOMovieReviews.com is still available, for example...

•  Lessen the inevitable search-engine penalties. Sooner or later, you’ll want to make changes to your website. While changing the actual look of a site shouldn’t affect traffic numbers too much, you many have to clean up source code or implement other “backend” changes that can affect your numbers.

After accumulating lots of messy source code and suffering from slow download times, we were forced to revamp the entire website, including messing with many interlinked websites. Our programmers undertook this project in short time, with the thinking being that we would suffer as small a blip as possible in traffic rankings and actual production of content for the website.

The result was a penalty assessed by the Google search engine on LiveCasinoDirect for two months, with the concomitant drop in traffic, thus income. Though we knew such changes would be painful, we had to bite the bullet on this one.

There’s no reason you have to do the same, though. Just make sure when the inevitable overhaul comes that implementation of changes is extended through a long period, with adjustments coming in gradually. And again: Watch those interlinks!-- written by Os Davis