It is equally important to understand what you cannot do to build a brand. The first is, having a low price. When you compete on price, you are in the commodity business, not the brand business and any lower priced competitor can destroy you. If anything, increase, not lower your prices!

You cannot also build a brand around having the best quality, best taste, best colors, etc. Consumers expect the best quality and quality is the price to get into the market. Successful brands have the best strategy not necessarily the best quality.

Here is what I recommend. Use a suggestion tool (Overture, Wordtracker, etc.) to see what people are searching for in a category that interests you. Ignore the top results since these mega keywords will already be "owned" by the big guns in the minds of the consumers.

Find a narrow niche where there is not much competition and build a site and a business around it. When you do, make this your small part of the mountain and aim to dominate. Remember the Net is global and the size of your market is growing daily. Being a big fish in a small pond can make you very financially secure for life.

For instance, if you are interested in selling lipsticks, do a search and you will see that some women search for "red lipsticks". This is not a big enough category to attract the big boys but you can own this narrow category as your very own, worldwide, for life.

Remember, being first is the most powerful branding strategy. If you are the first site to focus on selling red lipsticks and you are the #1 site for red lipsticks on every search engine, eventually, when a woman wants to wear a red lipstick, your site should be the automatic place to go.

If you try to be the #1 site for lipsticks in general, you will face tremendous competition and get wiped out since there are tons of site focusing the category. But you can certainly own your own piece of the lipstick mountain by narrowing your focus.

Adopting this strategy is a nightmare for established brand owners who make a living selling lipsticks in general. If you do this successfully you will really make their lives miserable and they have no way of responding, because you already own the dot com and the #1 website.

Doing so also has huge publicity potential. If you do this really well, you can do wonders with the right publicity. The media loves a David and Goliath story. That type of publicity will drive tons of visitors to your site and really build your brand. I have seen people like this end up on Oprah!

When you go this route, your affiliate site is no longer a flea market but you are a brand owner, with brand equity which is a long term asset. Remember, 50% of Coke and Nike's value is their brand name.

I would therefore recommend that you build a content site around your niche and then use it to recommend products for your affiliate programs. If your visitors view you as an expert, chances are, they will accept your recommendations when you weave it into your content. Banners are a total waste of time and make your site look amateurish.

It is also very important to build your own database of customers and potential customers. If you have a focus about something that you are passionate about, chances are you are an expert. Write a short, content-rich ebook and give it away free on your site and on any other site that will host it.

You will get tons of downloads since FREE is the most popular four-letter word on the Net. To download it, visitors must put in their first name and email address. File them in your database. Every month, write a short content-rich newsletter and email it to them. Get cheap software that will pull out the first name and insert it in the subject bar such as "Hi Mary, your....newsletter". They'll not view it as spam and will open it.

So, you give away an ebook, which costs you nothing to write for a chance to market to a database of potential customers for life. That's a great deal! By sending out your monthly newsletter, you reinforce yourself as an expert and when your subscribers are looking for something in your field, where do you think they'll come first?

Aim to build this list up to 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, etc. This now becomes your most valuable asset, so keep it safe. Recently, I did a targeted mail out to 1,000 people and it cost me $0.40 a name. If you have a database of 100,000 and you offer it to a reseller for $0.20 a click, every time they use it to do a mail out, that's $20,000 in your pocket. How does five mail outs a month sound?

The point is, ideas are plentiful. However you will get nowhere unless you have a strategy, focus on building a brand and if you are prepared to think outside the box.

I agree that staff setting up in competition makes you stronger.

However IN THE CASE OF SOME BUSINESSES, I totally disagree that staff should be given all the knowledge. If they had it all they would not need you. In a business with low barriers to entry you need to keep your cards very tight you your chest.

The way we got around this problem was to raise the stakes for all new market entrants. We cornered the market and grew to a size that made it impossible for anyone to start from where we did. Our product offering is now so broad that a new competitor would have to invest a lot of money to get a toe hold.

That's the first mover advantage. If you are the first mover, don't waste your chance.

I have heard many views regarding running pay per click campaigns and an affiliate program. The one I agree with is to not compete with your affiliates on the same terms sending traffic to the same site. For example, we have affiliates that pay per click and send traffic to one of our sites that generates replacement window sales leads for contractors. We also run pay per click campaigns to generate these leads, but we send the traffic to another site that affiliates have no involvement with.

I've also heard Affiliate Managers regulate the terms that affiliates can use within their ppc campaigns. For example, you can give them the approved ppc keyword list for your program and then bid on other terms yourself so as not to compete directly with your affiliates.

I've also seen Affiliate Managers restrict the PPC engines that affiliates can bid on, but I'm not sure that is the best tactic. There are really one a handful of top ppc engines.

Some affiliate managers agree that they should not compete with their affiliates in ppc campaigns and their solution is to simply say affiliates can not ppc for their offers. However, if you do not allow them to run ppc campaigns, more than likely your competitor will and I'm sure you'd rather have them send the traffic to you than your competitor.

In general, the argument as to why you should not compete with your affiliates is that you'll end up driving each others cost up and if they are working for You, you should not be making it harder for them you should be making it easier. Regardless of how you pay your affiliates, you are paying them for the completed transaction. When you're running a ppc campaign you paying for everything including the click costs so it's more cost effective for you to allow the affiliates to run ppc campaigns, but directly competing with them will increase their cost and eventually they will not have an effective ROI to justify their ppc campaigns for your offers.

If I can do $15 with this few users, imagine what I can do with 10-100-1000 more?

You can't necessarily scale your success with a small initial test group. I think you need those 1000-5000 visitors and then measure your success. You can't know for sure if your original test was a fluke or certain sign of success.

I have noticed when adding a new product, there will be a spike in sales and then it will die down. I think the spike is due to the new factor, some people love new and will buy because it is new (at least to them). If I were to judge some of my sales based on that initial spike, I would be sorely disappointed in the long run.

If you feel you have done your market research well, your initial buyers are thrilled with it, keep throwing some more money at traffic. Maybe poll your buyers and find out why they bought, emphasize that in your marketing language and keep on it.

Firstly I’d like to point out that I think all affiliates managers should be running at close to their profit margin on affiliate commissions.

When considering your costs with affiliate marketing you can broadly divide them into two distinct groups (as is the case with most marketing endeavors). Fixed and variable costs.
Fixed costs are those that do not change no matter what volume of traffic or sales an affiliate produces. An example might be the cost of printing and mailing a monthly affiliate commission check. If you are writing a check for $50 or $50,000 the cost of the postage stamp, envelope and time are the same.

Variable costs are those that increase proportionally with the activates taking place. For example; bandwidth costs for an affiliate would generally increase as the volume of traffic/sales they send increased.

(note: I’m aware of small indiscretions above, like increased bandwidth becoming cheaper or increased taxes associates with large checks but I’m just keeping things simple)

Now if I’m running at a 0% margin on $500 a month worth of sales (i.e. paying the entire revenue amount to an affiliate) I am not in a position to increase payment to the affiliate in question.
However, if that affiliate was to start sending $50,000 a month worth of traffic I could factor in the saving I have made on my fixed costs. This could quiet easily equate to $500 in banking fees alone.

Specialty foods are another good example. An artisan cheesemaker may not find it practical to buy an ad in GOURMET or BON APPETIT, but AdWords/AdSense can help him reach people who enjoy reading about (and eating) fine cheeses. He doesn't need to reach a million readers; he needs only to reach enough cheese buyers to meet his production and sales goals.

Now for a personal observation: In the last several years, I've witnessed a huge increase in "Internet awareness" among smaller travel vendors. Hotels and B&Bs that once had pages at CompuServe, GeoCities, or local ISP addresses now have their own domains, and travel businesses that subsisted for years on referrals from ads in the back of THE NEW YORKER or travel magazines are now using AdWords (and, more recently, AdSense) to drive traffic to their own Web sites. In another five or 10 years, will Bob's Burgundy Barge Cruises or Velma's Villas in Tuscany even bother to advertise in THE NEW YORKER or TRAVEL & LEISURE? I don't know, but I believe strongly that the Internet will be their primary (and most profitable) advertising medium in the not too distant future.

If you hate to do these things, then you should find a person who's willing to do it for you. With the amount of traffic you have, you should be able to make some kind of revenue from this.

Everyone unwilling to make those phonecalls, etc, has to survive on affiliate programs and advertising networks. The Internet just hasn't matured to the point that a content-only site can depend on others to outsource its advertising.

There are lots of resources on the Internet on how to sell, including making cold-calls, etc. It's unpleasant work, but it's the key to making money.

Think of it this way. Dell computers has a site. They are the manufacturer. If they wanted to be the ONLY ones selling their product and the only ones listed in the search engines selling their products - where would they be? They have thousands of resellers, dealers and distributors selling their products for them. And thousands of affiliates are selling their products as well.

You can and should prohibit your affiliates from competing with you for your own brand name. But savvy affiliates will come up with many additional keywords that you may not have thought of and will many times know how to out rank you. As long as the sales come to you, you are just maximizing your exposure.

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You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by adding an affiliate program. Just be sure you treat your partners fairly and set your program up as a WIN/WIN and it could be the best decision you have ever made!

If they really want to do the internet world a favour they should start by addressing the senders ability to be both anonymous and unaccountable.
I don't think we could honestly say that email addresses are public information like your mailing address. It needs a whole different set of rules than post.

Having said that,though, I think more responsibility needs to be put on the recipients too. I register for services, using my email address frequently, and after 13 years on the net I receive about 20-30 UCE a month. I look at a friend's email inbox and she has 650, over a course of three weeks.

But enough of that. There has always been intense dislike of affiliate marketing by a sizable and vocal segment of the web community. This is so notwithstanding the fact that utilizing sales agents (affiliates being their equivalent on the web) was long a method of doing business before the internet burst on the scene.

I pose these questions. Why should the search engines dictate how merchants do business on the internet? Why should the search engines discriminate against a class of entrepreneurs (affiliates) by denying them ranking while at the same time fostering purveyers of porn.

In my opinion, the task of the search engine is to provide relevance regardless of the source of that relevance. If a merchant isn't able to provide the requisite level of relevance for a given search, and an affiliate marketer can, what difference should that make?

Penalties should be strictly limited to sites that spam or violate the SE's TOS. If an affiliate site is in compliance, then the prevailing algorythm weightings should determine how that site appears in the rankings for a given search as against all other offerings.

Particular business models should not be the concern of a search engine.

If you're a merchant, and affiliates are out ranking you, and assuming they are in compliance with the SE's TOS and accepted practices, then you have no reason to complain. Look to what you need to do to improve your site in order to achieve the necessary level of relevance.

1) An affiliate manager who can be either called up on the phone, or be within a 2-3 hour email away.
2) Some sort of forum where the affiliates can interact with other affiliates, as well as the company.
3) Contests and incentives to progressively develop more sales.
4) Tools to make the affiliates conversions easier whether this be an XML feed or something else to allow for affiliates to personalize sites.
5) Prompt payment-preferable direct deposit.

The unsuccessful programs tend to not put in the time nor effort to communicate with their affiliate partners and expect the sales to be on auto-pilot.

Longer titles mean less focus. In competitive areas, focus may be important.

Proximity of words in a title, and on a page, is also important, again more so for competitive phrases than for less competitive phrases. Adding extra words might space out some phrases you're targeting too much.

For example... if you're targeting big widgets, inserting "red, blue, and green" in your title, as in "big red, blue, and green widgets," might hurt you for searches on big widgets, even though it might help you on green widgets. Depending on how competitive red widgets is, this longer title may or may not achieve what you want on this phrase. Ditto with blue.

On the other hand, if big widgets is not supercompetitive, and if you have good inbound links and good on-page content, you might end up ranking on a variety of phrases... ie, big widgets, red widgets, blue widgets, green widgets, and the latter three with big as an additional modifier.

I've seen titles that are lists of phrases, and I suppose if you're targeting your pages that way, it's better to have a phrase in the title than not... but this is often not a very strategic way to target a page because it doesn't make the most efficient use of inbound anchor text.

And yes, order does make a difference.

Regarding Google's response to all this, the other 28 pages remained at a zero PR for the first couple months, the other 2 pages jumped to a PR of 4 in the first month. Currently, a year later, the 2 pages are a PR6 while most of the other 28 have leveled out at PR5 ( a few PR6).

As for other SE, it appears to have had no positive or negitive effect. All 30 pages get crawled regularly and display decent in the SERPs.

What had been interesting to watch was the total click throughs from the SERPs. The 2 pages of changing content have generated at least double the incoming traffic from users during the first 6 months as I was constantly changing content. It became apparent that the SE's were not dropping the old, nonexistant content as fast as they were adding the new content to the index of these 2 pages. Users were still clicking through to a page using keywords for over 3 changeovers prior in addition to the newest indexed set of keywords targeted.

The test is over since I've found the right mix for the web site, so can't say what the results would be like today with the rapidly changing SE environment. But I'd say change can be good. Design changes are good for the end user and appears to not impact negatively with the SEs.

A better approach is to use these terms in valid content. First off there is the "Cheese" factor of having words at the bottom of your page for seemingly no reason to the end users. The other factor is that you could be possibly violating Spam rules and the site could be banned. The best approach is to use these keywords in context. For instance if you have a site that caters to a variety of different industries, simply list them under a heading called "Industries Served" or something relative. Another issue is that it rarely helps if you put alot of keywords on one page, most pages are optimized for 2-5 key phrases or words. Simple listing 30 keywords at the bottom of your page is probably not going to help your rankings. Another issue is keyword density. The engines can tell if you are only using a word once on the page, and would deem that page to have very little relational content to that keyword.