“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

“Just because you are working in digital does not mean you should not utilise offline marketing techniques to drive visitors to your website. Use any and every means possible to spread the word. This includes prominent references to your URL and what you have to offer on stationary, leaflets, mousemats, mugs, bags, clothing, etc.

Attending a conference? Wear shirts or t-shirts with your domain name emblazoned on them and make sure the back of your business cards inform people about your services.”

Linda O’Connell

Head of Client Services

“Twitter is the talk of the town at the moment and there are tremendous opportunities to utilise the social networking site to earn commissions. The landscape is similar to how things were when search engine PPC advertising came into being several years back.

You can post links to CJ advertisers in relevant discussions either manually or using various tools out there – please don’t spam! You can also buy low cost CPC advertising through Twitter ad networks. The profits can be handsome: I’ve seen publishers buy ads for 4-6p a click and make 30-40p off the back of them.”

Ross Carder

Account Executive

“I’m always surprised at how few website owners study their site’s bounce rate. This is the percentage of people who return to a referring site, such as a search engine, from the home page. Obviously the lower you can make this, the better.

Solutions such as those from Valueclick’s Mediaplex and Google Analytics allow you to analyse this vital metric. You should carry out multivariate testing and A/B split testing to see which version of your home page works best, and not only has the lowest proportion of people leaving your site, but leads to the highest conversions.

Here are a useful list of split testing tools and services.
”

Tom Leadbetter

Key Account Manager

“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.

Ross Carder

Account Executive

“Back-up, back-up, back-up… you’ve heard it before, but make sure you make regular back-ups of everything on your computer and mobile device. Imagine what would happen to your business if you were to lose critical emails, files and contact details.

Business and Ultimate versions of Windows Vista include Backup and Restore Center. There are also some fantastic third party tools which can make the process of copying and restoring files painless. And a few of them have an affiliate program on CJ, so you can make money while reminding others to back-up!”

Tom Leadbetter

Key Account Manager

“With the sun beginning to shine (kind of!) you may be thinking about attending more online marketing events. The best places to find out about forthcoming UK conferences and gatherings are Netimperative, eConsultancy and Affiliates4U.

CJ staff will be attending A4U Expo Europe taking place the week after next, of which we are the Bronze Sponsor.”

Brezo Sanchez Ocana

Account Executive

“I was reading an article the other day that Google image search now provides as much traffic to many websites as Yahoo’s main search engine in the UK. Therefore it’s imperative you optimise your images for SEO.

You should, for instance, give you images SEO-friendly names. Use keywords separated by hyphens that will help search engine bots determine what the image is about. So, instead of ‘alisonguise1.jpg’ use ‘alison-guise-commission-junction-mediaplex.jpg’.”

Cath Caporn

Account Manager

“If you are advertising your website(s) using paid search you should use a cashback credit card for your PPC spend. The best ones give you around 1% back on every transaction and the sum can add up if you are a heavy spender.

There is information about credit cards paying cashback on many websites such as here on Money Saving Expert.”

Dipa Shah

Account Director

 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

Business Intelligence Engineer

“When doing PPC, advertise on specific long tail keywords or multi-phrase search queries. They are more effective than generic keywords because consumers entering specific search terms are almost at the end of their buying cycle and easier to convert.”

Katie Harrod

Account Director

“If you have a blog and are limited for time, why not ask your publisher friends to write guest articles for you? You can reciprocate by doing the same when you have a quieter moment.

This will save you time finding new ideas to write about, attract new readers and offer your subscribers a different viewpoint. Your guest bloggers will benefit by building their profiles with a new audience and you can give them links back to their website(s).”

Jason Baker

Head of Agency Account Management and Publisher Development

“Content publishers can build valuable email lists by offering customers free reports and exclusive advertiser offers in return for customer data. You can use this data to email customers and bring them back to your website.”

Linda O’Connell

Head of Client Services

“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

“Publishers: if you don’t already provide a contact telephone number for your site visitors, consider doing so. Consumers are more inclined to buy via your site if they can speak to someone in person about any queries concerning their purchase or user experience on your website. A contact telephone number also makes your business appear more professional and safer to use.”

Florian Gramshammer

Senior Sales Manager

“Harness the power of social networking: research current trends and customer behaviour by joining Facebook or Twitter, and visiting groups industry peers are joined to. Shared interest groups have invaluable consumer information, feedback and opinion.

However, discipline yourself to not get sidetracked into unproductive activities on these addictive websites!”

Hildegunn Iversen

Key Account Manager

“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

Business Intelligence Engineer

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.

Dipa Shah – Account Director

Allow your visitors to search your website with a Google Custom Site Engine. Host the search box and results on your website and customise the colours to match your own branding and web pages.

You can also install a script or use a remotely hosted service. There is useful insight to the various options here.

Cath Caporn – Account Manager

If you are a content publisher you should update your websites with unique and relevant information. These are sites that are looked upon more favourably not only by their  visitors but also by search engine bots. Sign up to Google Alerts to stay informed of the latest sector, product and company news.

Hope that these are useful to you.