Time has flown right past me so here is a double whammy of tips of the week.

September

“As many of you know, the words in H1 header tags are given weighting by search engine bots and contribute towards you ranking higher for those words.

If you think huge H1 fonts will make your web pages look ugly, you can use CSS to reduce their size. An example would be:
[STYLE TYPE="text/css"]
H1 {font-family: verdana,arial; font-size: 9pt; color:#ff4500}
[/STYLE] (replace [] with <>)”

Katie Harrod
Account Director

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“If you are building a website for which you wish to receive traffic from natural search, drill down to a niche or even specific product. It is highly unlikely you will rank well in the SERPs for “uk online bookshop” but you could do for “patricia cornwell books”. Register a domain name with the target keywords in it, such as patriciacornwellbooks.com, carry out extensive onpage and offpage SEO, and hey presto you could be ranked on page one in Google for the term!

Google’s famed Keyword Tool will help you find search terms to target.

Jason Baker

Head of Agency Account Management and Publisher Development

“When you register or renew a domain name, do it for as many years as possible. Whereas .uks are restricted to two years by the registry Nominet, .coms and other TLDs can be registered for ten years.

Aside from not having to renew the domain name on a regular basis, a longer registration period has other advantages. Search engines like Google and ISPs like Hotmail are or will start looking at how long a domain name has been registered for and factor it into determining if the owner is more likely to be dubious or not.

Spammers often only acquire a domain name for a year or two and then move onto using other domains, while ethical website owners are more likely to register a domain name for a longer period of time.”

Katie Harrod

Account Director

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Calling all affiliates…

Matt Bailey at i-level is running a new initiative - the ‘i-level Affiliate Surgeries’. These are open to all affiliates – you don’t need to have worked with i-level to get a place.

The first session is about SEO and Content and will be held on May 26th from 5 – 7pm at i-level’s offices in Oxford Circus. It will be run by Matt Bailey and also joining him will be Judith Lewis, i-level’s Search Director.

All details can be found here. If you want to attend you need to email matt.bailey@i-level.com. Only 30 spots up for grabs so get in early. Happy learning

I am writing to you from the A4U Expo in Amsterdam which, as you would expect, is going swimmingly. Rather foolishly I have forgotten my camera lead so I will give you a full report with pictures later this week. In the meantime though, here are April’s Tips of the Week.

“Publishers should consider creating a PDF information pack and case studies demonstrating the results they have generated for advertisers. These can be provided to your CJ Account Manager and advertisers to enable them to learn more about how you operate and develop a closer working relationship.

You can see some case studies on the CJ website here.

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Happy April Fool’s Day. So far nothing has happened to me but I remain on guard. Below are the CJ Tips of the month but before I start I thought I would give you some tips for today.

 Lock your computer (this is the most important of all), keep your phone with you at all times, repeatedly check your back for notes, look under your desk for any food stuffs which may have been taped there (this sounds weird but I speak from experience – the offender not the offended). Oh I could go on forever. Above all trust noone. Not even your best friend. Not even your close colleagues.

Anyway – here are the CJ tips of the month for March.

“Using hotlinks to log straight into affiliate networks can save considerable time. The hotlink for Commission Junction is this one. USERNAME needs to be replaced with your login email address and PASSWORD with your… errr… password. It can be used by both publishers and advertisers.

Another example is this hotlink URL for Valueclick Media’s lead generation arm.

You can save the URLs to your browser favorites, although I would recommend you do not do this if your computer is accessible to others.”

James Lamb Read the rest of this entry »

Here are tips of the week for February. I hope that you enjoy

“If you haven’t done so already, set up a blog to support your affiliate marketing efforts. Blogs can increase organic search listings, attract more customers and enhance brand awareness. The most user-friendly one is Wordpress – we use it for this blog.

Create a ‘blog schedule’ to keep your blog updated with regular news, trends and product information.”

Emmanuel Ogidan

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We’ve had some feedback from our publishers about creating deep links on CJ and so we wanted to create a quick help guide to shed some light on the best and quickest way to do it.

To start with it should be stated that not all merchants allow deep linking. Most do, but there are some exceptions which are normally due to limitations on the advertiser’s end or the way that they’ve chosen to integrate with CJ. For the majority of merchants who do allow deep linking this is how it works: Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed any of them, here are January’s tips of the week consolidated for you. I am not quite sure why I only seem to have 3, maybe something to do with the new year. Anyway – here they are.

Brezo Sanchez-Ocana  – Account Executive

Search engines such as Google penalise websites with affiliate links in both their natural and paid listings. Some publishers cloak affiliate links. There are a range of methods for doing this, using Javascript, PHP and htaccess (the latter two are the best). You can read more about the various techniques here and here.

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Did you know that you can get product level data in Commission Junction’s performance reporting? This is a really cool, useful feature but can be quite difficult to find unless you know about it. Below is a screenshot of the product performance report from the publisher side.
In the items you can see the number of items or products sold. To pull the product performance report you simply need to click on this figure and it will open:

As you can see this gives you a breakdown of how many products you have sold of each type, the total commission and the sale amount for each product. This is particularly useful for cross-selling products, it will give you a good idea of which products you can push more on your site. A pre-requesite for this functionality is that the advertiser has implemented an item-based pixel allowing us to track the products sold. Hope that you find this useful