Before you decide to put time into making money from an affiliate program, it is a good practice to consider what methods you will use to promote that particular product. One method that I often use to promote affiliate products that works very well is article marketing. (If you want to learn how to promote affiliate products using article marketing, I will be covering this in a future article…subscribe to Richard Cummings below.)

What is Link Cloaking?

I often achieve great affiliate success by doing article marketing combined with link cloaking.

Link cloaking is when you mask the identity of the real website and use YourPurchasedDomain instead. This technique is very easy to do with GoDaddy. You simply buy the name, visit the Domain Manager at GoDaddy, select the domain name that you want to mask, click on the “Forward” tab above, and choose “Forward With Masking” as you see in the photo below:

Link cloaking has its advantages and disadvantages.

In my mind, the one greatest advantage to link cloaking–and why I use it–is the “one hop” concept. If you create the traditional landing page, the chances of you getting the affiliate click, and thus the revenue, are diminished significantly. Plus, with this strategy, you do not need to create a site of your own. You are simply serving as a salesmen for a particular product and taking your commission.

The largest disadvantage to link cloaking is that you cannot build and promote a brand which you control. The product is not your own and you will forever be at the mercy of others with this strategy.

Finally, one of the biggest reasons that you may not want to use link cloaking is that it is not an acceptable practice with that particular affiliate program. For example, if you tried to cloak a GoDaddy link, I think you might run into some trouble.

What Is A Link Redirect?

A link redirect is a much more common and acceptable practice.

In this strategy, you are not concealing the identity of the affiliate; you are simply redirecting your link to their link.

Here is an example of a link redirect. If you read my blog, you know that I am a big fan of Wordtracker and use it everyday. As a fan of this program, I became a Wordtracker affiliate and promote this product through the redirect link that you see in the previous sentence.

How is this a redirect link?  Well, as you can see the link URL is my site, but the page uses a redirect to get to Wordtracker.

People redirect links for a number of reasons. Some use URL redirection to conceal their affiliate IDs and more easily manage their links while others use it because it is often the only method aside from “cloaking” to place links on foreign sites (not your sites) that do accept affiliate links.

Redirecting a link is very easy. It can be done through a simple php redirect or by modifying your .htaccess file (this method is slightly more technical). To redirect direct a link using a simple PHP redirect, create a blank text file with the following content:

<?php
header(“Location: http://youraffiliatelink”);
?>

Then, you will want to name the file with a .php extension and place it on your website. You can then use this link to redirect visitors to your affiliate link.

If you would like to accomplish this through your .htaccess file, it’s not that complicated.  In a his page entitled Using .htaccess to Hide Affiliate Links, Derek explains this process in easy to understand terminology.

Link Redirect Vs Link Cloaking and Affiliate Usage

Technically, creating a cloaked link or a redirected link is not that difficult as we have seen. What is difficult is figuring out who accepts which form of link redirection.

The reason that this is difficult is because people use these terms–link cloaking and link redirecting–interchangeably when, in reality, they are completely different. For example, an affiliate may say that they do not approve of “link redirection” when they are actually referring to cloaking.

Cloaking would be perceived as “deceptive” by name brand companies and they would surely ban your affiliate account. However, it is generally an accepted practice with Clickbank products–some downright encourage it.

Link redirecting on your own site seems to be a commonly accepted practice that everyone does. However, using these same link redirects on other sites–not your own–is not quite as accepted. It is more of a grey area.

For example, you will read from some people that Commission Junction does not allow link redirecting while you will read on some forums that others do it all the time.

Again, much of this confusion stems from the fact that people use these terms interchangeably. People are saying that Commission Junction does not permit redirecting a link when they are actually talking about cloaking a link.

Link Redirect Vs Link Cloaking: Summary

In this article, we have demonstrated the difference between redirecting a link versus cloaking a link.

In summary, each method directs you to the affiliate link but when you use “cloaking”, the URL address of YourPurchasedDomain.com stays in the URL bar. Many affiliates do not permit this.

Most affiliates permit redirecting a link. If they didn’t permit this, hundreds of thousands of sites would be shut down immediately.

This affiliate acceptance of link redirection is a little less clear if you are promoting your redirected link on other sites. If you are uncertain of what is permitted, simply email the affiliate and ask them.

After all, they are in the business of making money so why should they say “no” to a good idea!

In this article, we take a look at a concept called tangential thinking, which will enable you to succeed in competitive markets that offer great returns.

I recently wrote an article called Making Money Online with Commission Junction.  In the article, I mentioned one of the great affiliate programs with Commission Junction, the HostGator Affiliate program.  When someone signs up through one of your HostGator affiliate links, you receive in excess of $100 for that customer from Commission Junction.

The entrepreneur in you thinks, “Great, I can get 80 customers a month, just 2 or 3 a day, and I’ll be able to rake in about $8,000 a month.”

If this is you, you have the proper mindset of someone who wants to make money online.  The problem is…almost everyone has that mindset.  It’s easy to think of making all that money.  The hard part is figuring out how to do it.

The people who realize opportunities early on certainly have a first mover advantage.  If you type “hostgator review” into Google, look at who comes up as the first entry:  a website named http://www.hostgatorreview.org/.  As you can see in the domain record for this domain, it was registered a little over 3 years ago and now sits atop the Google rankings getting all the traffic for someone typing in “Hostgator Review”.  Suffice to say, the owner of this domain is a very solid money maker with the prescience and know-how to conquer “hostgator review” traffic.

Seeing this great success, people either give up their HostGator affiliate dreams thinking “he already did…it’s too late” or they do the exact same thing and create a http://hostgatorreview.info type of site.

Both responses are wrong.

If you give up, you will not realize any HostGator affiliate income because…you gave up.  However, if you do the exact same thing as HostGatorReview.org, your competition will be too steep.

To succeed in the face of this stiff competition, you need to learn to Think Tangentially.

We often here the word tangent used when someone digresses on a subject:  “Ah, he went off on a tangent and talked forever”.  The word tangent is also used in geometry meaning “making contact at a single point or along a line; touching but not intersecting.”

Using tangential thinking for success encompasses both of these definitions.  When you want to succeed in a stiff market, you have to look for ideas that are tangential to the main idea.  That is, ideas that “touch the topic but do not directly intersect”.

In the case of HostGator, the main idea would be to write HostGator Reviews (or cheap web hosting, best web hosting, reliable web hosting, etc), but, as we’ve seen, you’re too late for that.  You need to look for tangential ideas.   Ask yourself questions like:  “Who else needs information about where to host a website?”  “Are there people who need the information but don’t even know it until I tell them?”

When you ask yourself these questions, you may be lead to new territories, new ideas, and, most importantly, new opportunities.

For example, in the HostGator ideas that are already taken category, we see that people searching for all these terms–web hosting reviews, HostGator reviews, etc– are people who already know they need web hosting and are now looking for the best deal.

However, if we begin thinking tangentially, we can think of different types of searches like, “How Do I Create a Website?”, “Where Can I Register a Domain Name?”, “How Do I Get My Own Email Address?”, “Do I Need A Website?”, “My Website Went Down”, etc.

All of these are tangential searches.  They do not directly address web hosting, but HostGator has a solution for them.  You can be the one who brings these searchers the Hostgator solution and, in the process, earn very good money in an extremely crowded market.

To achieve tangential success, you need to think freely.  Write down all ideas that come to you…even ones that seem stupid.  If you reach a mental block, do some surfing on the Internet for terms you think might be related.  This will stimulate you and make your tangential list even longer.

Once you have a solid list in place, you are now on your way and you can begin having online success in a crowded market.  Remember, in the case of an affiliate like HostGator, you do not necessarily need massive traffic for solid income.  Let’s say  your “tangential lists” bring you a total of 1000 visitors a month and you receive a 1% sign-up ratio, or 10 people per month.     At over $100 per sign-up, that’s an extra $12,000 per year for a few tangential pages.  Not bad, huh?

Remember, you will always face stiff competition online where the rewards are plentiful.  You should not give-up nor should you try to do the same thing that everyone else is doing.

Thinking tangentially, you can create traffic and generate great income by identifying unexplored territories of very competitive markets!

Why would you want to do this? Well, you might be losing a lot of money and lot of web traffic and not even know it.

A client of mine recently came to me and remarked:

“I recently realized in looking at my web stats that I am getting a lot of people who are looking at my web images from the Google search results. However, I don’t benefit from that at all. They see my image in the Google search results but never get one look at the content of my site. Is there anything that I can do about this?”

In fact, there is something that you can do about this.

Many people out there are losing significant potential income because people are viewing their website images from the Google images results but not actually viewing their website.

There is something that you can do about this and it is very easy to implement. It is a WordPress plugin called Break Out of Frames. This is perhaps one of the easiest plug-ins that you will ever implement that yields the biggest reward.

After implementing the plugin, when people view your image from the Google Image search results, the image page will be redirected to the page containing the image, rather than just the image itself.

After implementing this simple little plugin, the client referenced above had 1000′s of more visits to his website monthly and drastically increased his income.

Occasionally, there are those little things that you can do which yield large results. This is one of them–take advantage of it!

How to Make Money With Commission Junction

There are many affiliate programs available to those who want to make money online and Commission Junction is one of the “big boys”. Commission Junction offers a wide variety of products to promote and many of them offer very healthy commissions. Even if you belong to other affiliate programs like Amazon or eBay, you may want to consider Commission Junction because they fulfill a niche that the others do not.

Let’s take a look at an example.

One of the most heavily promoted products on Commission Junction is Hostgator.com, the web hosting company, and they pay terrific returns (about $100) if someone signs up using your affiliate link. Hostgator pays a large payout because they, in all likelihood, will have the customer for a very long time and earn much more than $100 from that customer.

This is an obvious but very important concept to focus on when making money with Commission Junction or any other affiliate online: the more that the advertiser earns on a customer, the more that you will earn as an affiliate.

However, this also means that the competition is stiff. For example, with Hostgator, you will find their advertisements everywhere and thousands of “Hostgator Reviews” as everyone seeks to get their little share of the Hostgator commission pie.

You don’t need to write a “Hostgator Review” to be get a slice of the Hostgator pie though. Anybody who has a website is a potential promoter of Hostgator. For example, on this website, Richard Cummings, people visit for many reasons and one of them is to learn about the Internet. These people are curious about the Internet and a Hostgator promotion might serve them well.

Hostgator is a big fish at Commission Junction, but a bunch of little fish also make quite a nice dinner. Do you want to go after 1 sign-up for $100 or 100 sign-ups that each pay $1?

The Email Versus the Credit Card

If one website asks you to submit your email and another requests your credit card, which are you more likely to provide?

Exactly.

There are many little fish sign-ups available on Commission Junction that will pay a buck or two for customer information, such as an email address or a physical address, and do not require you to pull out your credit card and pay for something. In such a CPA (cost-per-action) event, the customers are much more willing to do the action.

Insurance and credit card companies are often willing to pay for this action. In fact, many of them pay north of $5 simply for getting a customers name, address, and phone number. Again, they will probably be getting a customer for life–how often do you change your insurance?–so, for them, this information is worth it.

Once you decide what advertisers that you would like to promote, you might be faced with one unexpected problem at Commission Junction: The Advertiser will deny your application.

Commission Junction: Advertiser Application Not Approved

With Commission Junction, you have to apply to each advertiser individually. After you sign up with CJ, you will be very excited with all of the advertisers that you would like to promote. Then, upon application, you will frequently be met with a message saying that the Commission Junction advertiser has denied your application. This can happen “automatically” with an immediate rejection notice or afterward for those sites that do a manual review. You may see a message like the one below:

Following a review, you may receive a message such as this:

Commission Junction advertisers that don’t have automatic approval are a complete mystery to me. And, the fact is, most advertisers that you will want to work with do not have automatic approval.

The whole idea of a Cost Per Action program is that the user has to take an action (more than a simple click) for you to make money. No action, no affiliate money.

Why would advertisers ever refuse an affiliate? I suppose if the action is simply providing an email, there could be massive fraud involved, but when the action is to buy the product, rejection makes no sense.

Be that as it may, you will often be rejected by Commission Junction advertisers but don’t give up after the initial rejection. This is part of the advertiser weeding out process. If you really want to advertise a certain product, use the “mail” icon in your CJ panel which allows you to email the advertiser directly. Write a well-crafted note explaining why you want to advertise their product and how you will go about it. About 90% of the time, the advertiser will then accept you.

Making Money Online With Commission Junction: Summary

Commission Junction should be an affiliate program in your making money online pool.

There are many advertisers that you can promote with a variety of affiliates. For example, the Rosetta Stone Language Program can be promoted through Amazon or Commission Junction. Often though, the online portion of a site, such as the case with Rosetta Stone or TurboTax, can only be promoted using Commission Junction.

After you sign up for Commission Junction, and determine the advertisers that you want to work with (big fish/small fish?), your next challenge will be to get accepted by that advertiser. As I mentioned, they will often refuse you. However, with a carefully worded email explaining yourself to that advertiser, you will usually get accepted.

After that, the dollars await…but only if you can generate the traffic.

Can you generate the traffic?

This has caused waves throughout the making money online industry for a couple reasons:  (1)  There are many who thought that having a Blogger blog was as good, if not better, than having your own domain.  And (2), it appears that Google is cracking down on stereotypical making money online blogs, or MFA (Made for AdSense) sites and especially those who use a few dirty little secrets to attract buyers.

Let’s first look at the site.  According to his about page, The Money Maker Info blog is owned by a gentlemen of 32 named Alan Liew.  Alan had achieved Google top results, often number one, for many making money search terms including the granddaddy of them all “make money online”.  By all estimates, this favored positioning earned him between $50 and $100k annually if not more.

Then, a little over a week ago, Google simply cancelled the blog sending Mr. Liew a message saying that his blog was a “spam” blog.  Just like that.  All income gone.

There was an Internet outcry over this.  You can view this Warrior Forum Thread where one user echoes the sentiments of many:

Wow, this is a HUGe HUGE Shock. Alan’s Site www.moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com is over 4 years old and has been number one for hundreds of huge Keywords including ‘make money online’.

This goes to show (as I have been saying myself) that you need to Host your Own Domain and if you use the Blogger interface to back ALL your content up. There is no excuse as use can automatically do this with Blogger.

That being said I am speechless about this as I have come to love Alan’s Blog. But it got flagged for Spam.

Even bloggers who were doing everything that they could to overtake Alan Liew in the search engines cried foul with this one.  Why?  Well, the reasons given were simply not true…it is not a spam blog.  It seemed to be a gross overstepping of bounds by Google and an indication that they are truly embracing a big brother type of mentality.

When Google labels a blog a spam blog, the chance of having it re-instated are normally virtually nil.  However, in this case, about 5 days after the disabling of the account, the account was re-enabled with very few words from Alan himself.  Since Google owns AdSense, and the Blogger platform, people seem too fearful to talk about any of this.  I would genuinely like to know why the blog was first cancelled and then renabled, but we’ll never know because nobody will talk.  Personally, I like to think that Google listened to the folks out there negatively commenting on this and took the appropriate action.  But, again, we’ll just never know.

Many people take this as proof that you should never rely on a Blogger blog because it can be cancelled at Google’s sole discretion.  Rather, you should always have your own domain name so that you are not subject to the whims and limitations of another company.

Another very popular making money blog, Making Money Online for Beginners, which is also hosted on the Blogger platform, has received similar condemnation from Google.  In the article Making Money Online in 2010, the author Griz makes note of the fact that Google seems determined to hit those with a penalty who write about making money online and do it too well.  He silently but conspicuously removed AdSense from his pages, from which he was reportedly earning a few thousand a month, after several emails received from the big boys.

Finally, in another article that references these two blogs, the author writes about How to Not Make Money Online after Google de-indexed all of his sites and basically turned his $100 a day profits into nothing as his sites were too much Made for AdSense.

Is Google right in doing what they have done or are they turning into the feared big brother?

The answer lies somewhere in between.

Many people create websites simply to make money from AdSense and they do not provide real value to the visitor.  Since your place in the search engines is dictated by quality and quantity of links, these people get themselves to the top of Google by creating quality and quantity links…themselves.  This is not really what Google would call natural and Google would be justified in removing these sites.

However, I would add that each of the websites cited in this article, while probably engaged in significant self-promotion, are all sites that do provide value about their respective topics.  I have fairly consistently read them all and each provides significant content worthy of their Google positioning.

There are two things that you can take away from what happened to Alan’s site and these others.

One, if you are starting from scratch and want to create a serious blog, do not go with a Blogger blog or any other freebie that subjects you to the whims of others.

And two, if you make money from Google AdSense and talk about, you best not talk about how you manipulated the system to do it.  If you do, you’re gone.

AdSense Alternatives: Why?

About three months ago, I decided to give other advertising programs a try as alternatives to AdSense. I did this because I had some sites that I was interested in monetizing but I did not want to include those sites in my AdSense pool.

There are many reasons that people consider AdSense alternatives. For some, they may have run into difficulty with their AdSense accounts with Google closing their account for legitimate or incomprehensible reasons (there are people who claim that their AdSense account was closed for “no reason at all”.) Others simply do not want to dilute their AdSense sites and they choose to branch out and consider other AdSense Alternatives.

Why I Chose Chitika As An AdSense Alternative

After much research, my choice for an AdSense alternative was Chitika. I thought that their ads looked professional and I liked the choices available to me. But, most importantly, I liked their new and future strategy. Let’s look at how Chitika approaches PPC advertising and how they compare to Google AdSense.

Chitika has launched a new premium service aptly called Chitika | Premium for Publishers. I like many things about this including their initial description:

“Make sure your SEO’d site is cashing in on that search engine traffic with Chitika | Premium, the world’s premiere search targeted advertising solution!”

Firstly, I like that Chitika says “Make sure your SEO’d site is cashing in on that search engine traffic…” While Google sometimes seems to frown on SEO, Chitika is telling us to Go For It; Make money on that well optimized site! Most importantly though, Chitika’s new premium system works! I know because I have seen the results!

How Chitika Works

Chitika provides ads to visitors based on their exact search term. This is extremely important and something that Google does not do. While Google provides ads based on the content of the page, Chitika provides ads initiated by the search terms used.

Which do you think is going to provide better results?

Here is a sample of how a Chitika Ad looks when one searches for Magic Tricks:

You can visit Chitika and play around with the results it would provide based on various search terms. There is a also a video that will show you the exact results of a sample search.

Do you notice anything else significant about the Chitika Ad above? If you’re familiar with Google AdSense policies, you do. There is an image next to the ad! While Google AdSense strictly forbids this, Chitika endorses and implements it. Why? Simple–people click on advertisements with images. This seems like a no-brainer to me. Chitika has it. Google AdSense does not!

Will AdSense Become Chitika-Esque?

The evolution of the Chitika strategy is interesting. Of course, Chitika acknowledges, and we all assume, that Google AdSense is the only way to go. In fact, Chitika often refers to their solution as Google-esque.

However, one can argue that Chitika’s new premium strategy leads Google’s AdSense technology. As I wrote about in the article entitled AdSense New Interest-Based Advertising, Google is slowly changing their AdSense model from contextual to interest-based, which tracks the users Internet behaviors and provides ads accordingly.

We could legitimately ask: What is more interest-based than what the user is searching on at that very moment? Might we be saying in the future that Google AdSense is Chitika-esque?

Show Me the Money

The real question that publishers, and advertisers, need ask is this: Which service, Chitika or AdSense, provides the most return on my investment?

I can only speak as a publisher of these two services. In a three-month period of testing, Chitika and AdSense have achieved nearly similar returns, both with click-thru rates and earnings.

Thus, Chitika is certainly a viable alternative to AdSense.

Chitika and AdSense Together

The beauty of this debate is that you do not even need to decide. Chitika can be used alongside AdSense.

AdSense policies state that you cannot implement any form of contextual ads or ads that look too similar to AdSense. Chitika is neither of these. Their ads are not contextual; they are search-based. (Ironically, they use Google’s search engine to achieve their success.) And, they do not look like Google Ads so you will not have a problem with this either.

So, what happens when the traffic does not come from a search engine but from a direct link? In this case, you have three options.

1) Collapse Into Nothing: This does not sound like it makes a lot of sense initially, but it is actually quite clever. By choosing collapse into nothing, you reward your frequent visitors who come via direct links. They will not see an ad that they probably would not have clicked on anyway.

2) Show a Different Ad (such as AdSense): This allows you to take advantage of AdSense and Chitika at the same time in the same space on your webpage.

3) Show Chitika Backfill: This will show standard, non-targeted Chitika ads.

Chitika Review: A Summary of a Great AdSense Alternative

I began experimenting with Chitika as an AdSense alternative. Frankly, perhaps like you, I thought that it would not measure up to Google AdSense on any front.

But I was wrong.

Chitika is a very professional company that implements an advertising model that equals if not exceeds that of AdSense.

But, for publishers, the most important question is: Will I make as much money? Based on my experiments, the answer is yes!

Get set up with Chitika now.

As I wrote in the article Wordtracker vs. Google Keyword Tool: Which is better for keyword research?, I use both Wordtracker and the Google Keyword Tool to identify a solid base of keywords for articles and promotional material.  I especially like Wordtracker for long tail keywords.  This is an area in which Wordtracker excels and the Google Keyword Tool fails.

Occasionally, I will stumble upon some amazing long tail keywords that ostensibly would result in massive amounts of hits to an article.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Bring up the free version of Wordtracker and type in the word “hurricanes”.  What do you see? The first entry that appears under a Wordtracker search for the keyword “hurricanes” is this:

More than twelve thousand people per day are searching for the term “how do hurricanes form”!!!

If this is the case, I will go create a website about how hurricanes form, become #1 in Google because there is not much competition, and makes loads of money with advertisers.  Life will be good and lots of money will roll in!  Right?

Right?

Regrettably, it’s not quite that easy. Like when we find that shiny, 2-year old BMW convertible on sale for $2,500 and we think, “Wow, I have found the one in a million deal”, we need to ask the question:  Is this too good to be true?

Is Wordtracker Accurate?

I use Wordtracker everyday.  It is an amazing tool for long tail keywords and keywords that I would never have considered.  On top of that, I also use common sense everyday.  And common sense tells me that there are not more than twelve thousand searches a day for the term “how do hurricanes form?”  So, what happens?  How could Wordtracker be wrong?

Wordtracker and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

In my many years of teaching computing networking, I often demonstrated how to measure and analyze network traffic. I invariably brought up The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in these discussions.  This principle essentially states that “to measure an activity is to modify the outcome”.   As we were analyzing network traffic (an activity that creates network traffic), we were modifying the results.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle produces similar results with Wordtracker.

As people using Wordtracker find exciting, hidden keyword gems, they then go out and search for that term to evaluate the competition.  This, in turn, creates many more apparent “searches” for that particular term.

Of course, like Heisenberg, I am theorizing.

In an article entitled Keyword quality and the Wordtracker database, we read that Wordtracker maintains the purity of their results by using two sites: http://www.dogpile.com and http://www.metacrawler.com.

Wordtracker uses these sites, which purport to roll all of the search engine queries into one place, to provide quality data that cannot be manipulated by automated programs.

It would be an interesting undertaking to have 10,000 people search these sites for a long, silly term such as  “Why can brown paper bags help you with asthma?” and see what happens.

Is Wordtracker Accurate: Summary

I know without reservation that Wordtracker is not always accurate. I know that it is a victim of the people using it…a victim of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I also know this. I use Wordtracker everyday because it is the best long tail keyword analyzer.

I have used many long tail search terms found on Wordtracker that claim to receive 2,000 hits a day and receive just that after I get the page to the #1 spot in Google.

So, when you find a great, obtuse long-tail keyword that seems too good to be true (like 12,000 hits a day), it might be. However, it might just be the next big thing! How can you tell the difference?

The old fashioned way:  Common Sense!

Now…I am going to go find the answer to the question…How Do Hurricanes Form?

High Paying Keywords and Placement Targeted Advertising

Historically, AdSense has relied on placement targeted advertising to deliver relevant contextual advertising to your web site visitors. Thus, if you have a site about golf, all of the AdSense ads placed on your site would be somehow related to golf and thus appeal to your visitors.

Those seeking to earn high dollars with AdSense learned over time that all keywords were not created equal. In fact, while you may earn .05 (yes, 5 cents) from an ad about toothpaste, you could earn more than $10 per click from ad about DUI or insurance. On this list, we see that the term “Austin DWI” pays in excess of $80 (yes, 80 dollars) per click.

Throughout the years, the leading high paying keyword has been Mesothelioma. Why do these terms such as “Mesothelioma” and “Austin DWI” pay so much?

To answer that question, we simply need to logically ask Who Pays This Amount? and What do They Get Out of It?

For example, with “Austin DWI”, we can make some assumptions: Austin, TX is a college town, filled with many privileged kids (and wealthy, young Dell Stockholders) who like to go out, get drunk, and have a good time. Thus, when they get popped for a DWI, it will cost them $7-$15k to get this DWI matter resolved. Lawyers are willing to pay $80 per click to get this return.

Similarly, the lawyers are willing to pay this for the term Mesothelioma because there are many class action suits brought about by lawyers on behalf of clients who have acquired this type of cancer in the workplace. Again, the rewards are huge and the lawyers are willing to pay to attract their clients.

The pioneers of making money with AdSense all tried to capitalize on terms such as Mesothelioma and other class-action lawsuit type of words such as Asbestos. In the beginning with little competition, these pioneers made lots of money. It is still possible today to maximize AdSense revenue by focusing on high paying keyword topics though the competition is much more fierce.

However, with the switch from placement-targeted advertising to interest-based advertising, we can reasonably ask the question: Is their party over? Is the future chase for high paying keywords a thing of the past? Is the new AdSense interest-Based Advertising model the end of Mesothelioma and Austin DWI? And perhaps most importantly, how will these AdSense changes affect the AdSense revenue on your website?

AdSense Interest-Based Advertising: The Paradigm Shift

AdSense is moving from away from placement-targeted advertising and towards Interest-based advertising. Like with most things Google-based, we are not given much of the detail. We know that this change will take place gradually and, in general, what it means.

Many of you have seen the notice to update your websites privacy policy. In fact, if you check your AdSense account, you will see the notice that you should have updated your privacy policy by April 8^th, 2009, which is a few months back.

(If you have not done so yet, be sure that you update your privacy policy now. You are welcome to use my privacy policy if you would like. Just remember to change the site name.)

The reason that you need to update your site’s privacy policy is for the new AdSense Interest Based Advertising. Google’s AdSense will now place a cookie, a double-dart cookie no less!, on your web site visitors’ computers. This cookie will then track their Interest behaviors and, Google hopes, deliver more relevant ads to your visitors and deliver you more money.

Thus, with this new policy, if you have a site about football, a visitor may see an ad about teeth whitening if he or she has visited many sites about teeth whitening in the past.

This is a great thing…except if your site has been optimized for Mesothelioma or Austin DWI.

If you have a site optimized for Mesothelioma, a high-paying keyword, and visitors are delivered ads about tennis shoes because they have just visited the Nike store, you may lose a lot of money.

Conversely though, if you run a site about tennis shoes, a visitor may be delivered an ad about Mesothelioma if they have searched for this term in the past. This will make the average web site owner much more money than an ad about tennis shoes!

Does this portend the end of sites being created solely to monopolize on high paying keywords?

Not necessarily…for three reasons.

First, it is possible to opt out of Interest-Based Advertising. To do this, visit the Google page entitled Can I opt out of interest-based advertising for my site? If you visit this page, you will see all the warnings and disclaimers which basically say, “If you opt out, we don’t like you anymore.” I don’t think many people will opt out but it is an option.

Second, Google has indicated that their model will be somewhat of a hybrid…a combination of content and cookie based advertising. This means that, if you have a site optimized for Mesothelioma, you may see two ads for Mesothelioma and two ads for q-tips.

And finally, third…follow the money. Google is not in the business to decrease revenue. While they want to improve the user-experience, they will not easily throw-away a cash cow. When you hear that a click pays $20-$80, guess who takes more than half of that?

Interest-Based Advertising vs Placement Targeted Advertising: Summary

Google’s new AdSense Interest-Based Advertising benefits most web-site owners. The goal of the program is to provide more relevant ads based on a visitors Internet patterns, achieve more ad clicks, and make you more money which of course makes Google more money.

However, if you create a site based solely on high-paying keywords, you will not like this new policy. As mentioned, you can opt out of the Interest-Based Advertising policy but you probably will not because then you are opting out on all of your websites. And if the new program works, Google may eventually do away with Placement Targeted Advertising all together.

So, does Interest-Based Advertising signal the end of Mesothelioma and other high paying keyword sites?

Not immediately…but one can sense the end may not be to far off…

The fact is most Amazon Affiliate Stores fail miserably without ever achieving even one sale.

The reasons for this will be evident to you after we explore the SEO, or non-SEO as the case may be, nature of an Amazon Affiliate Store.

Solid SEO is comprised of essentially two things:  (1)  A well-structured web page (see Heading Tags) that efficiently uses an in-demand set of keywords (see keyword research).  And (2),  a solid inbound link campaign whereby most links contain anchor text using the chosen keywords.

So, let’s look at your Amazon Affiliate Store with those two things in mind.

When we look at point number 1 in relation to the Amazon Affiliate Store web pages, the bottom line is that you have little to no control over the content.  For the most part, your Amazon Affiliate store is filled with pages of duplicate content.  The only control you have is the text that you are able to write on the first page and the category pages…and even that is somewhat limited.

Let’s look at a random Amazon Store that I have selected:  Graco Products.  (There, I have just given them an extra link!)  This store is hyper-focused on selling Graco Products, a company who apparently sells lots of stuff for kids.

On this page, we are able to see where the creator of this Amazon Affiliate Store has control.   He or she can control the title and the description on the webpage.  This is the only part of the page over which he/she has dominion.  The rest is non-unique content that many other websites will have before you (especially Amazon!).  We can see that the non-unique content, at the top under “Graco Products” is simply filled with keywords in the hopes of getting some search engine traffic.  If you click on one of the category links to the right, you will see the same holds true for the category pages–a lot of keywords followed by the built-in, non-unique, Amazon content.

Then, we can ask, are these pages well-structured?  The answer is…sort-of.  These pages do not have H1 Heading tags (a quick way to check this is with the SEO Book), but many of the product pages have solid H2 tagging.  However, given that the content is not-unique, a well-structured OPSEO page will really get them nowhere.

Thus, an Amazon Affiliate Store fails on the first point of SEO.  There are not many opportunities for truly unique content, no opportunities to keyword optimize detail pages, and not much of a choice in the way of optimizing heading tags (though the stores do allow for a semblance of customizing CSS).

Does this mean that there is no point in creating an Amazon Affiliate Store?  Not necessarily.  There are many Amazon Affiliate Store pages making A LOT of money on the Internet right now.

We need look no further than the Graco Products Store that we have just visited.  I truly chose this store at random simply by typing http://astore.amazon.com/… into google.  Frankly, I thought the store would be nothing because the home page has no page rank.

However, I have just clicked on the Graco Stroller category and realized that it currently has a pagerank of 4 (in a review of this article on August 13, this pagerank has disappeared), which is huge for this type of site.  Does that mean that the keyword-stuffed description actually works?  It helps…but not a lot.

This page must succeed in criteria number 2, which as you’ll recall is this:  “…a solid inbound link campaign whereby most links contain anchor text using the chosen keywords.”

I have not even checked this out but I know it to be true.  The bottom line with Amazon Affiliate Stores is that you have to choose hyper-focused topics (like Graco Strollers) and then build massive inbound links.

Let’s head over to Yahoo Site Explorer and have a look.  There, we can see the number of inbound links to this page.  And, as we see, this page currently has about 1,500 external inbound links.  Not bad for a stroller page…though I still get nothing in google for this site on a Graco Strollers search.

So, we realize that an Amazon Affiliate Store only succeeds with massive inbound links.  Let’s find some Amazon Affiliate Stores who score really big.

If you have kids, you know that they love Webkinz.  Well, check out who is #2 in the google listings for Webkinz just below the authentic Webkinz site.  Yes, it’s an Amazon Affiliate Webkinz Pet Store (I’m so nice with links.)  This site has a pagerank of 5 and more than 10,000 inbound web links.

Like the Nintendo DS Lite?  If you type buy Nintendo DS Lite, in google, the fifth entry down is an Amazon Affiliate Store called  Buy Nintendo DS Lite.  Is he/she successful because the site is called “Buy Nintendo DS Lite” or that he has that name in the URL?  Those do factor in, but with an Amazon Affiliate Store, it’s the amount  and the quality of inbound links.

Can you be competitive in your chosen Amazon Affiliate Store Niche?  Well, as we have seen, the real question is, “can you beat the competition in the amount and quality of inbound links?”  The best tool to discover this is SEO Elite which will tell you all that you need to know about competitors links including:  amount of inbound links, page rank of the inbound linking site, and, most importantly, the anchor text used for the link.

If you can best the competition in those categories, you too will have a successful Amazon Affiliate Store.

PS:  There are some different Amazon Affiliate Store opportunities out there that may interest you more such as Associate * O * Matic, which you can download and install for free to try it out.  Associate * O * Matic creates an Amazon Affiliate Store with much improved SEO and less duplicate content.  The Easy Store offers a similar product.

PPS: If you would like to learn how to create truly unique Amazon content, I will be writing a series on creating unique Amazon pages using an XML feed in the near future. You can subscribe to my site via newsfeed or email to be automatically informed of the updates.