Once you’ve made the decision to become an affiliate marketer, you’ll notice that the competition is fierce. Do a web search, and you’ll find literally thousands of other affiliate marketers on the Internet who are promoting their products. With thousands of people uploading new websites each day, how can you make your affiliate marketing site stand out among the rest?

If you want to stand head and shoulders above the crowd, think outside the box when you’re creating marketing campaigns. Don’t get caught up in trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead, put a new spin on an old product. This is where you’ll want to get creative. Find a marketing hook that will spotlight your product in a different way.

Connect it with something that is happening in the news. Stories are great hooks for spotlighting your product as a solution to a current problem so look beyond the obvious benefits for marketing ideas.
Here’s a fun idea: Don’t be afraid to draw attention to some of your own everyday adventures in your marketing campaign. Marketers will do just about anything to keep their customers interested. I’ve seen everything from skydiving to ocean cruises incorporated into marketing messages.

People spend a lot of time on their computers, and if you give people insight into your world and entertain them in the process, you can probably find a marketing hook somewhere in your day-to-day life. Reward customers a one-of-a-kind experience when they land on your website.

If you want to build excitement about your product, create a contest. Customers love to get involved in the creative process, so ask them to name your product, develop a tag line, or find a new way to use your product. It’s not only fun, but you’ll get some great ideas for your business. Be sure that the prize is something that is particularly useful for your target market. Give away free products, offer a free membership in your mastermind group, or give away a month of free consultations.

Create a win-win for both you and your customers. Finally, if you want to remain competitive, you’ll need to master the skills of social networking. Listen, the face of Internet marketing is always changing. It’s not always the most polished person in the room who is the most successful sales person. For the Internet marketer, personality often pulls over polish. Take advantage of all the social networking sites to promote your products. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are very successful avenues for building a loyal following of prospects. These sites are very effective for building rapport with your niche market.

The key to long-term success is to have fun with your affiliate marketing business and to think creatively. Working online does not mean that you should keep your distance from customers. Establish yourself as an expert but also show your personality when marketing your business. Think outside the box and have fun by using unique ideas to create long-term profits for your affiliate marketing business.

Although social media is supposed to be about real social interactions, it seems that they are getting harder and harder to come by. This trend is really ironic given the basis for what social networking even is.

According to C.C. Chapman of Digital Dads, the reason this is happening to social media is largely due to the growth of the industry. As the industry has grown and advanced, it has gotten much more commercialized and even has an increasing number of tools and regulations associated with it.

While some of the changes are useful, it’s definitely clear that the original meaning of social networking has gotten blurred. Chapman told us that “common sense gets forgotten” in social media today.

“Basic manners [and] basic talking to people seems to get lost in the megaphone of the Internet,” he said.

Chapman explained that this same type of trend occurred in the early days of the Internet as well when businesses discovered it as an opportunity to make money. Even though there are money-making opportunities in social media that businesses can and should utilize, they do need to be careful as they execute their strategy.

“Let’s face it – businesses have to exist,” said Chapman. “As someone who consults with companies of all sizes liek ralph lauren coupons, online marketing and social media marketing are amazing tools that, with the right strategy and the right budget and everything, can do amazing things for a company.”

The key in this is that businesses need to have a goal for using social media that consists of more than just creating a Facebook or Twitter page. Chapman said that businesses should think about why they are online and create a goal from the answer. Once this is determined, businesses can develop a strategy by figuring out which tools will help them meet their goal.

However, this doesn’t give businesses the right to neglect the natural interactions in their social strategy. Chapman told us that it still takes relationships to get business done, no matter how big or how small a business is.

“At the end of the day, at least in my opinion, people still buy from people,” he said.

“The company that has basic common sense, basic manners, and still has a good product… I’m gonna connect, and I’m gonna buy from them a lot more,” he added.

In your opinion, are too many businesses forgetting about natural social interactions?

Google has introduced some changes to Webmaster Tools – in particular, handling of URLs with parameters.

“URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs,” explains Kamila Primke, Software Engineer with the Google Webmaster Tools Team. “This functionality provides a simple way to prevent crawling duplicate content on your site. Now, your site can be crawled more effectively, reducing your bandwidth usage and likely allowing more unique content from your site to be indexed. If you suspect that Googlebot’s crawl coverage of the content on your site could be improved, using this feature can be a good idea. But with great power comes great responsibility! You should only use this feature if you’re sure about the behavior of URL parameters on your site. Otherwise you might mistakenly prevent some URLs from being crawled, making their content no longer accessible to Googlebot.”

Google is now letting users describe the behavior of parameters. For example, you can let Google know if a parameter changes the actual content of the page.

“If the parameter doesn’t affect the page’s content then your work is done; Googlebot will choose URLs with a representative value of this parameter and will crawl the URLs with this value,” says Primke. “Since the parameter doesn’t change the content, any value chosen is equally good. However, if the parameter does change the content of a page, you can now assign one of four possible ways for Google to crawl URLs with this parameter.”

Those would be: let Googlebot decide, every URL, only crawl URLS with value or no URLs.

Users can tell Google if a parameter sorts, paginates, determines content, or other things that it might do. For each parameter, Google will also “try” to show you a sample of example URLs from your site that it has already crawled that contain a given parameter.

To bring up the use of caution again, Primke warns about the responsibilities that come with using the No URLs option. “This option is the most restrictive and, for any given URL, takes precedence over settings of other parameters in that URL. This means that if the URL contains a parameter that is set to the ‘No URLs’ option, this URL will never be crawled, even if other parameters in the URL are set to ‘Every URL.’ You should be careful when using this option. The second most restrictive setting is ‘Only URLs with value=x.’”

She runs through some examples in this blog post, and there is more related information in Google’s Webmaster Help forum.

Be Careful About Selling the Same Stuff From Multiple Domains

As long as we’re discussing webmaster issues for Google, I’ll also point to the latest Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts, who discusses selling products on multiple domains. The user question he sought to answer was:

“I manage 3 websites that sell the same products across 3 domains. Each site has a different selling approach, price structure, target audience, etc. Does Google see this as spumy or black hat?”

Cutts says, “On one hand, if the domains are radically different lay-out, different selling approach, different structure – like, essentially completely different, and especially the fact that you said it’s only 3 domains, that might not be so bad. Clearly if it were 300 domains or 3,000 domains – you can quickly get to a fairly large number of domains that can be crowding up the search results and creating a bad user experience…by the time you get to a relatively medium-sized number of sites.”

“The thing that was interesting about the question is that you said it’s the same products, as in identical. So it’s a little weird if you’re selling identical products across 3 domains. If you were selling like men’s sweaters on one, and women’s sweaters on another, and shoes on a third….I’ve said before, there’s no problem with having different domains for each product, and a small number of domains (2, 3, or 4) for very normally separable reasons can make perfect sense, but it is a little strange to sell the same products, so if they’re really identical, that starts to look a little bit strange – especially if you start to get more than 3 domains.”

“Definitely, I have found that if you have one domain, you’ve got the time to build it up – to build the reputation for that domain…in my experience, when someone has 50 or 100 domains, they tend not to put as much work – as much love into each individual domain, and whether they intend to or not, that tends to show after a while. People have the temptation to auto-generate content or they just try to syndicate a bunch of feeds, and then you land on one domain vs. another domain, and it really looks incredibly cookie cutter – comparing the two domains, and that’s when users start to complain.