seo

Mar

2011

Affiliate Link Pal

Update: The sale for Affiliate Link Pal is now LIVE at $27.00.

We’ve now updated the plugin and zip, so if you go back to your personal download page you’ll find there’s a new version in there.

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This Friday I’ll be releasing an exciting new plugin called Affiliate Link Pal.

I hope you’ll agree that there’s a little spark of genius in this one. Ahem.

If you use a third party affiliate scheme like ClickBank or Infusionsoft or e-Junkie or whatever, then the problem is they don’t let your affiliates create links that point back to YOUR site. So your affiliates are always boosting the rank of those third party sites instead of your own.

Or maybe you use a self-hosted sales centralisation script that includes an affiliate scheme.

It might work great with your main site as it gets all the backlinks from affiliates, but it’s not so good with your satellite sites as they don’t get any links at all.

And it probably even creates long and complicated “unfriendly” links too.

It’s an annoyance we’ve probably all had to live with at one point or another, and if not, then it’s just waiting to happen.

Until now.

Using Affiliate Link Pal will enable your affiliates to create a “friendly” URL that points back to your individual site regardless of the actual affiliate link. When a prospect clicks the friendly link, the plugin redirects the prospect off to the real affiliate link.

So it goes like this:-

Friendly Link >> Unfriendly Affiliate Link >> Final Landing Page

Now you might be wondering at this point why the affiliate should bother to take this extra step, and not just use the original unfriendly affiliate link instead.

There’s two good reasons.

The first is, what do you think looks better for the affiliate of these two links? (Don’t bother clicking them, they don’t go anywhere.)

http://domainA.dom/aff/hop.php?aff=fred&item=65

http://domainB.dom/secret-free-trial/

Now I *hope* you’ve said the second one, because that’s the kind of link your affiliates will be able to create. 😉

I’m sure you can see how your affiliates will be excited to be able to create interesting links with a little bit of imagination.

The second reason your affiliates will be eager to create these friendly links is sales page customisation.

We’ve included the ability for you to create customised short code tags such as their name, which then allows you to mention them in your sales copy, giving it the more personal touch.

You must have seen custom created pages that say things like “Fred Bloggs and John Smith introduce…”, well the John Smith bit could be your affiliate’s name.

So the combination of “interesting” URLs plus page customisation is a double whammy to get your affiliates to take a few moments to create an SEO friendly link for you.

Their benefit is better, more clickable links, and yours is more links pointing directly back to your individual site. It’s a win-win for both of you.

As far as I can see, this plugin will work with ANY affiliate scheme. Affiliate Link Pal is NOT an affiliate scheme plugin itself, it’s meant to complement any existing affiliate scheme you may be using.

This coming Friday (4th March) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), the Affiliate Link Pal plugin will go on sale at a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

Oct

2009

How To Get More Traffic To Your WordPress Blog

Getting more traffic to your blog seems to be quite easy. About three weeks ago I installed Semiologic Pro (SP) including the Semiologic Theme onto this blog.

At that time when I checked with SEO Quake, I had just 95 pages indexed in Google. Today I checked again and I see I now have 658 pages indexed…

You can check for yourself here.

Or of course if you have SEO Quake for FireFox you can use that too – that’s where I got the 658 and above URL from.

Now, there aren’t 658 pages of content on the site, but for some reason which I now put down to Semiologic Pro, Google has now paid attention to all my “tag” pages, all my “archive” pages, all my “category” pages and so on. Yes I do have the “canonical” variable set for all my pages, but it hasn’t stopped Google from indexing the tag pages etc.

I’ve noticed that SemioLogic Pro has changed the format of the tag pages and this is probably one of the reasons that they’re now being indexed. Example:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/pareto/

For good measure, Google is also including a good few cloaked affiliate links (!!!) and some WordPress searches. In case you didn’t know, Google started including searches in its index a little while back by using keywords in form boxes and indexing the results.

What this all means is I’ve suddenly seen an increase in visitors from search traffic. It’s early days, but my estimate is somewhere between a third and a half as much more traffic as I was getting before I introduced Semiologic Pro to this site.

A 50% boost in traffic just for installing a new theme and plugins is pretty good don’t you think? It wasn’t hard to do.

More traffic means more subscribers and more sales, it’s inevitable. Knowing this has now given me an incentive to get my finger out and upgrade all my niche blogs.

Now I know that more traffic is something that you want, you’ve told me so. I asked earlier this year what the number one question was and the overriding response was “how do I get more traffic to my sites?”

I guess a related question that is probably driving that is “how do I make more sales?” or “how do I make more commissions?”

Okay, here’s the easy to do solution for your all your niche sites.

#1 – Go get SemioLogic Pro (otherwise known as SemioLogic Reloaded).
#2 – Use the WP Affiliate Pages method to build your sales sites.

For #2, that’s what I’m now doing for all my sales sites, and I’ve set myself another task ahead to convert the ones that aren’t yet running under WordPress.

From what I can see, when you add SemioLogic WordPress becomes an extremely powerful platform that pulls in traffic. If you then combine it with the WP Affiliate Pages method you have a dynamite combination.

When you stop to think about this, people agonise over improving conversions, and do split testing in order to make more money. The concept is if you can improve your visitor to sales conversion ratio from 1% to 2% you’ve just given yourself a 100% pay rise.

Which is great.

The downside is it takes a lot of work.

You can achieve similar results by doubling the amount of traffic of course. And if you can do that with little effort – just by installing a new theme and plugin set – then it’s a far more effective way to spend your time.

(Of course there’s nothing to stop you from going ahead and split testing too if you have the time.)

I believe this is something you should go and do right away. I dithered over buying SemioLogic Pro for nearly 3 years as I was unsure of the benefits. Let’s face it, claims are often made that turn out to be hollow.

What tipped me over the edge was seeing some big name marketers converting their own sites to this platform. Now I’ve seen the results, I’m really glad I did it.

Finally, the nice touch with SLP is like my own products, it’s not a per-domain licence (I hate that), you can install it on as many domains as you personally own.

-Frank Haywood

UPDATE:
Three weeks on from making this post, and there are now 885 pages indexed in Google. I have to say I’m amazed and a little worried that it will all crash and burn, but I have faith in SLP and what it can do. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. 🙂

Feb

2008