Attracting Affiliates

I only just noticed a video interview (above) that I did with Dr. Ralph Wilson of web marketing today on how to attract affiliates. In it, one of the things I talk about is looking for affiliate link signatures to track down your competitor’s affiliates. I should probably explain how you might do that. For example, let’s look at Amazon affiliates. I just searched the web and found an Amazon affiliates link for a self help book. A right click on the image lets me copy the link into, so that I can see how the affiliate links to Amazon. It is a link like this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572244135/theguidetosel-20

Looking at another book on the same site we can see this link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572242205/theguidetosel-20

So between the two, we can see the difference between the two links. If we want to find all the people that are affiliates of a particualar book at Amazon, say the “anger control workbook”, then we are looking for links that START with http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ … MajesticSEO’s link analysis let’s you sort by url – or even by part URL. So you can use MajesticSEO to find affiliates of a certain genre and use this to attract them to your program.

Here’s another example, more suited to most of us in small businesses. Mary Ferrin writes and runs www.dinnnerandamurder.com one of her affiliates is http://www.great-murder-mystery-games.com/death-by-chocolate.html and you can see that his page links to: http://www.dinnerandamurder.com/games/chocolate.htm?family=acc396a2&game=6a49e062 For a much more reasonable cost, I can find other affiliates linking to that page with the same ?family prefix by forcing an analysis in Majestic for links that ONLY contain “http://www.dinnerandamurder.com/games/chocolate.htm?family” in them.

He presto! Here are her other affiliates!

boardgamecentral.com
murderandmysterygames.com
partymerchant.com
play-dead.com
great-murder-mystery-games.com
signaturestyledecor.com
book-club-queen.com
corporateeventchannel.com
mbtb.com
mainlymurder.co.uk
mysterygamecentral.com
movil.be
registeredsite.com
murdermysterygames.com.au
adultthemepartyideas.com

Guess what you should do next with this data as a Merchant? Check these against your own affiliate list to see who you haven’t got. Since I own Murder Mystery Games… guess what I plan to do next week?