SEO & Affiliates: Know the Boundaries

Credit: svilen001

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to monetize your online content and make a living without having to work for the man. Of course, you can always use your affiliate income to supplement the one you get from your day job.  There are a lot of affiliates who make money by optimizing their websites for search engines. You can have the best paid search campaigns or get the sweetest display deals, but nothing beats getting free traffic from sites such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. As long as you can get your blog or affiliate portal to show up for short-tail and long-tail keyword searches, you are going to get an additional boost of income and lower your costs per conversion dramatically.

Before getting aggressive with your affiliate campaigns, you want to make sure that your affiliate program gives you enough freedom to implement your tactics. Many affiliates assume that using branded terms in domains or even sub-domains is OK, but many affiliate programs are cracking down on those types of sites, especially after the FTC put more pressure on them to deal with bloggers, affiliate marketers, and social media professionals.

Affiliate programs are not trying to be mean to you when they decide to kick your website out of their program for using branded terms. You just don’t want to confuse people and give them an indication that you are in any way or shape working directly for an advertiser. Let’s take Amazon for instance. If you are trying to build a website on Amazon’s movers and shakers, the last thing you want to do is secure a domain that has the word Amazon or its misspellings in it. Not only that, your sub-domain shouldn’t have those trademarked terms either. What’s the price? You’ll get kicked out if you are caught doing it.

I understand why some affiliates use branded terms in their domains. You get a decent SEO boost if you have specific key terms in your domain. But that could come with a price if you rank too high. Advertisers do check the SERPs and once they realize that you are ranking too high, they can ask you to give up your site or give you out of their programs altogether.

If you are an affiliate marketer and want to build a long-term relationship with an advertiser (and grow your business in the meantime), avoid black and gray hat tactics. They may pay your bills in the short-term, but once you get caught, the fun ends. Black hat affiliates don’t care about getting caught. But they are not building business. They are just making a profit breaking the rules. At the end of the day, only you know what’s right for your business.