Protected SEM Bidding Keywords For Affiliate Marketing

Before we proceed any further, let's define what affiliate marketing is. Essentially, affiliate marketing is the practice of driving qualified traffic to a merchant's website. When a visitor clicks on your affiliate link and proceeds to make a purchase, you get a commission from the sale. If your content is compelling enough, many visitors will be persuaded to make additional purchases from your site or via another affiliate program.

In our example above, the second strategy would be to prohibit your affiliate partners from engaging in any online paid advertising. Doing so would drive up keyword bidding costs for all of your traffic. Ultimately, you end up competing against yourself, effectively for a limited amount of paid keyword positions on a limited number of relevant keywords. The result? A smaller number of conversions from targeted visitors.

We've just discussed how some affiliates may abuse their position as affiliates. Let's consider another strategy some affiliate marketers use to take advantage of their competitors' lack of control over their own campaigns. What some affiliate marketers do is run multiple affiliate campaigns using the exact same keywords. The affiliate marketers let their main campaign run their parallel affiliate campaigns as well. This allows them to benefit from both keywords in each campaign. In other words, they're leveraging their competitors' keywords to attract more traffic from free search results.

This strategy can be abused as well. What happens when one of your paid search ads gets pulled or one of your ad links is clicked by someone looking for the same product you're promoting? Suddenly, your SEM campaign has become irrelevant. Not only does this type of dishonest marketing hurt your affiliate marketing earning potential, but it also hurts your search engine positioning.

One way some affiliates abuse their positions as affiliates is by using "sock puppets" to gain leverage over their competitors. If you don't know what a sock puppet is, it's an affiliate who employs underlings to post positive remarks or reviews for their business on popular blogs in exchange for a commission. It's not illegal. It happens all the time. I recently read an article discussing how Google penalized a handful of bloggers involved with affiliate marketing by temporarily removing their spots from paid search advertising programs.

Some affiliates will even go so far as to attempt to trick Google into punishing them by making their listings "spam-worthy." This is done by creating large numbers of link exchanges and link-building attempts with websites related in content to yours. The hope is that Google will deem these sites to be too similar to your own to merit a higher ranking. This can have serious consequences for affiliate marketing. For example, sites like Yahoo!, MSN and eBay all recently had their rankings temporarily lowered following the creation of these so-called spam sites.

Another form of spamming is referred to as "referring domains." A referrer is any web site that sends out traffic based on some kind of affiliate link. The problem here is that most traffic coming from referrer domains comes from affiliate marketing companies that buy lists of link exchanges and link-build offers. These companies then re-sell the information to those sites, which in turn, count on those links to boost their own rankings in the organic search engines.

It seems to me at least that there are ways to combat the problem of spam. That said, any of these problems mentioned here could be solved by taking a different approach to affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer it is up to you to seek out more targeted traffic sources and work to beat out your competitors. By doing this, not only will you be able to beat out your competitors but you will also be providing your customers with only the traffic that they are seeking. After all, who really wants to go shopping from a site that may be visited by merely five percent of its visitors?