Are you an affiliate marketer? Do you use networks such as CJ or LinkShare as the main source of your income? Then you could be in trouble with search engines. I don’t mean you are doomed or anything like that. It’s just that Google is aware that many have learned about the lucrative business that is affiliate marketing. But the problem is a 95 - 5 challenge. In other words, 95 percent of income is made by the top 5 percent affiliates in this market. Not everyone strikes gold in affiliate marketing, but not everyone is willing to give up on the idea. And they shouldn’t! The problem is that affiliate marketing is not a sit-at-home-slap-banners-on-pages-get-rich-overnight kind of a job. You actually need to treat it as a business and you need to put your heart and soul into it before seeing any success. In today’s world, Nothing is given for free.

If you have tried CJ or LinkShare, you see that they provide you with links and snippets. They even encourage you to use them by just copying and pasting them to your page. Now here is the problem. If everybody does what these guys are recommending, you are going to end up having the same content on millions of sites. I can say for a fact that Google has moved in to make it difficult for affiliates to get away with having duplicate content (or network content) on their sites. In fact a site that I used to promote gadgets on was recently removed the first 3 pages for no reason (no lack of text, no lack of backlinks…). So if you are an affiliate marketer, be sure to use ORIGINAL content. One needs to remember that for every one good affiliate marketer, there are 99 bad ones out there with no clue about what they are doing. Sometimes, what others do matters as much as what you do for your website. That is certainly a case in the world of SEO.

Affiliate Marketing has become a hot topic in recent years and many have quit their day jobs to try their fortune in the affiliate marketing world. Advertisers have also become more aware of techniques to strengthen their sales through Affiliate marketing. Successful affiliate marketers act as an extension for the advertisers marketing teams. While affiliate marketers are focused on increasing their revenues, the successful ones achieve that by thinking and acting an external part of advertisers. Many SEOs would tell you that affiliate links do not give you any SEO juice. That is true especially with the redirect links that you get from LinkShare and CJ. However, companies that maintain huge affiliate networks have the opportunity to offer incentives to affiliates who are willing to give them a direct link. Now think about that for a second. If you have a network of 5000 affiliates and you get only 20% of them to give you a link, you are certainly increasing your opportunity to get ranked higher on search engines. Why companies don’t try this is beyond my comprehension (though it could be the tough contracts that some of them have signed with LinkShare and CJ). But I am willing to bet that they will start doing so soon!