Weird affiliate strategy?

by Chris Thompson

Posted: 18 years ago 17 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Hey gang,

EDITED:
(based on Magic Johnson's comments).

By searching Google, I have discovered an affiliate that is promoting my product by generating a lot of free traffic that is not targeted at all. It converts very **very** poorly because the traffic is NOT targeted at all. Without revealing the URL, the strategy employed is to use a related domain ( .org/.info.net instead of .com) and to setup a bunch of files with URL names that are long tail keywords.

The files are all long tail keywords that are only VAGUELY related to my niche market, and therefore anyone who clicks on the links will say to themselves "WTF?". It seems the SEO rankings for each keyphrase is pretty good though. My niche is toddlers and parenting. The keyphrase "toddler voice sounds raspy" (something like that) is ranked like #3. But the traffic coming from it is junk.

The files are .asp files that redirect to a hoplink. They contain title and description tags (descriptions not grammatically correct, seem computer generated).

I'm trying to understand why an affiliate would do this and not target keywords that seemed more relevant. The keywords being used are only very slightly relevant to the market.

Out of 66 indexed pages in google, this guy sent about 600 visitors to me in the last month. Just got one sale today. So the conversion on his traffic is absolute crap but the cost is zero. Is it just genius robot-affiliate-marketing, or is it really just a bad idea? I'm curious.

#affiliate #strategy #weird

Magic Johnson

18 years ago

First of all. When you get a affiliate who wants to generate sales for your products you don't go out and post a persons promotion tactics and URL on a public marketing board.

That's about the most and surest thing to get someone to drop you in a heart beat. Also you look very amateurish.

I would delete that post if I were you.

Thanks
1 reply

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J Bold

18 years ago

Originally Posted by Magic Johnson

Says the guy who stole the best basketball player ever's (and my favorite of all time) name for his handle.

Ha ha.

But yeah, best to leave the URL out.

Thanks

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Chris Thompson 18 years ago

Magic - I edited it heavily. Sufficient?
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- 1 reply
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- Zach Booker 18 years ago
  
  I didn't see a problem with the original post...he didn't go into detail about what keywords he used. In fact I was quite curious to see what people thought of that technique.
  If used right it could be a pretty good technique I bet...
  
  Anyway just my 2 cents..
  Zach
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Chris Thompson 18 years ago
  
  So to be clear, the technique is to take someone's page (publisher), buy the .info or .biz (or whatever) version of the domain, and to have some robot make a bunch of files (pages?) where the following characteristics exist:
  
  1) the file name is a long tail keyword related to the niche
  2) there is a title and description tag also containing the long tail keyword
  3) somehow it must get submitted to Google so it gets indexed? The stuff I saw was always #3 or so ... which should be easy considering on page SEO is near perfect. Very little to no competition with inurl and intitle.
  4) The file must automatically redirect to the affiliate link
  5) Sit back and wait for sales.
  
  If this affilate has a 1/600 conversion (crap) but the effort is zero (almost), then the return on investment is still huge. That's what happens when the denominator is non-existent in the ROI calc.
  
  It's kinda clever, but I'd think way more effective to spend a couple of hours coming up with RELEVANT long tail keywords. I remember buying a $7 WSO that taught me how to find these keywords. It was worth every penny.
  
  Thanks
  
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Jared Alberghini 18 years ago

Chris... I think your post was perfectly fine the way it was... please at least add back the part where you mentioned about junk traffic = no conversions... targeted traffic is the key.

Anyways, yes it's a bot/artificially generated content... the program simply creates pages with their list of high traffic keywords, add your keyword, and link all the pages to your hoplink.

I can't think of the name of the program I just saw that does this... If I remember the name I'll post back here.

- Jared
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Mike Bogowski

18 years ago

The affiliate probably just has no idea what he is doing.

Stuck in the traffic mindset. They probably just think more traffic = more sales and is targeting any words they can get their hands on.

Thanks
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onlinetreason

18 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Benkovich

The affiliate probably just has no idea what he is doing.

Stuck in the traffic mindset. They probably just think more traffic = more sales and is targeting any words they can get their hands on.

True, doesn't look experienced.

Thanks

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Daniel Deegan 18 years ago

Ponder this..what if the entire "site" was researched and setup in maybe 15-20 minutes using certain scripts?...What if you had hundreds of sites like this in different niches?
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- ExRat 18 years ago
  
  Hi,
  
  I'm with Gorilla writer - it sounds like they have created an auto pilot search engine 'spamming' affiliate business. They are probably earning a lot more than you would imagine - and can take a break from their business anytime without worrying about customer service etc.
  
  Personally I wouldn't want affiliates promoting my product like that and therefore associating my product with the type of site that makes customers go 'WTF??!!' - therefore I think you have every right to be annoyed and to want to stop them if necessary.
  
  Thanks
  
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James Schramko 18 years ago

It is wierd. Another "shortcut" mindset affiliate. I guess it is taking attention to yur product even if it is bad.

At least it is better than a cookie stuffing bot surfing the web stealing cookies from you.
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mudmat 18 years ago

Weird stuff there..

I didn't such a tactic exist.. but that guy could have improved it by targeting more targeted keywords if he had done his keyword research first..
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sequincer 18 years ago

Probably a Novice at work,more Traffic is not = to more sales/leads.
its all about the quality of the traffic and how relevant and targeted they are.
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- ExRat 18 years ago
  
  Hi Sequincer,
  
  Probably a Novice at work,more Traffic is not = to more sales/leads.
  its all about the quality of the traffic and how relevant and targeted they are.
  
  I disagree.
  
  Add a few more factors into the mix.
  
  a) the person is relying on free organic traffic via poorly created pages. If they only aim for targetted traffic from the best keywords, then they might get no traffic (due to competition from well made pages) which equals no sales. So getting 1/600 sales is better than none.
  
  b) we don't know how long it takes to make the pages. It might be so much easier to make the bad pages that produce poorly targetted traffic than it does to make pages that produce targetted traffic that they could be running a more efficient operation by doing it the way that they do.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Paxton 18 years ago
  
  I've got pretty mixed feeling on the whole subject. If this particular approach is working for the affiliate then sure. good luck to them.
  
  It's probably a touchy topic and there are bound to be loads of opinions on how to get better SEO and rankings.
  
  It's not so much that I ignore bots and stuff like that, it's simply a matter of my sites (and sales) performing better when I target my content at real, human visitors.
  
  Give people what they are looking for and the chances of repeat business from the same buyers increases.
  
  I always get a buzz when surveys I run on my sites come back as "referred by a friend" as the answer to "how did you find us".
  
  I have some visitors who come back to my sites and buy regularly. We are all told about the benefits of recurring payments to our business, well for me at least, the best kind of recurring payments I can get is from people who come back to my sites every month because they WANT to, not because they've signed up for a monthly billing.
  
  Get the traffic for lower competition keywords, make your sites interesting and useful to your visitors and the chances are you will start to see sales for the higher competition products on your sites.
  
  Thanks
  
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  AndyCamden 18 years ago
  
  Sounds to me like the affiliate is just experimenting like we all do in the beginning or IM. I would just way the pro's and con's. Do you think it is legitimately hurting your business?
  
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Chris Thompson 18 years ago

I doubt it is hurting my biz. 125 to 150 visitors per week out of a possible customer base of probably a billion people. I'm not really bothered by it. It's a fact of life if you put a product on ClickBank.

I was just more curious if anyone had seen this strategy before. I agree it is weird, but then again the guy could be making a killing if he sets up hundreds of these with less than an hour of investment per site.
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Weird affiliate strategy?

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