The Perfect Link Bait

Since Link Building is a hard and complicated process, the best possible way is to invest your link building budget into Affiliate Marketing revenue share system. Sharing a fair percentage to affiliate marketers will outsource your link building efforts to them. The more revenue you share the more links you will get. The best of all is that you will be able to monopolize your products on all Search Engines as your own website will appear on the top search engine listings. Assuming you are selling products or services a 5% to 25%-30% (or based on the average affiliate revenue share percentage for your product/services niche). This can only be done if your invest a proper SEO affiliate marketing system.

In order to achieve maximum result, your affiliate marketing system should cover few basic requirements:

• To be built in or added as a plug-in to your current product content management system
• To allow individual product product and custom landing pages control.
• To offer various affiliate marketer statistical information and research tools as well as good ad-channeling system.
• To be SEO friendly.

The first three are apparent in most popular online shopping cart software but some of them are not really good in SEO. In order to have successful SE optimized product page you will have to add few lines of code which pretty much change the whole affiliate sales tracking process. This is something I red a while back and implemented myself few months ago, and now I find huge amount of good quality backlinks to my product pages. The whole thing that it does is that it redirects (301 Permanently Moved) any affiliate tracking link (ex: http://mywebstore/category/product?aff=affiliateid) to the plain product page URL without any tracking id (ex: http://mywebstore/category/product). but still tracking the affiliate referral with a php function call. Using this method you can prevent duplicate the duplicate content issue which is pretty common to the bad shopping cart software and in this way boost your search engine rankings as each affiliate link counts as relevant backlink.

The following code is part of my own affiliate tracking script:

affiliate-system-file.php

// records the IP address where the user comes from and the Affiliate Marketer who brought this user to our website
function AffiliateIn($user) {
        // if we don't have affiliate variable defined then this should not be tracked,        
	if(!empty($user)){
		// This is user marketed by affiliate and we must record it to database
		/* Login to Database Server */
		mysql_connect("localhost","database_username","database_password") or die ('I cannot connect to the database because: ' . mysql_error());
		mysql_select_db("database_name");
		
		/* Insert the Tracking Code to Database */
		mysql_query("insert into `affiliate_tracking` (`ip`,`affiliate_id`) values ('".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."','$user')");

		// redirect the user back to the original product page without tracking ID in order to prevent search engines from thinking this is duplicate content and to count this link appropriately.
		header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
		header ('Location: http://mywebstore/category/product');
		die();
	}
}

function AffiliateOut($sale){
		/* Find if this sale is affiliate sale */
		$web_visitors=mysql_query("select `affiliate_id` from `affiliate_sales` where `ip`='".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."'");
		if(mysql_num_rows($web_visitors)>0){	
			$current_web_visitor=mysql_fetch_array($web_visitors);
			$affiliate=mysql_query("select * from `affiliate_users` where `id`='".$current_web_visitor["affiliate_id"]."' limit 1");
			mysql_query("insert into `affilaite_sales` (`affiliate`,`sale_id`,`sale_amount`) values (".$affiliate["id"].",".$sale["id"].",".($sale["value"]*affiliate["revenue_share_percentage"])."));								
		} else {
			// THIS IS NOT AFFILIATE SALE
		}
}

product_or_landing_page.php (may be on all pages except checkout page)

// LOAD AFFILIATE TRACKING
require("affiliate-system-file.php");
AffiliateIn($_GET['aff']);

checkout.php (where the payment is completed/ after verified)

// LOAD AFFILIATE TRACKING
require("affiliate-system-file.php");
// Checks if this was affiliate sale and records it
AffiliateOut($sale);

NOTE: The script shown above is not complete. I’ve tried to show only the concept.