What’s the best way to spend my link building budget?

Let’s face it, for most of us, link building is a time consuming and (sometimes) soul-destroying past-time (I have to say though, I actually really enjoy it, but I’m a bit weird like that).

But that’s enough about me.

I think that if you’re an online retailer, you might want to consider investing some of your link building budget in an affiliate campaign. The reason is that if you set this up properly, you’ll receive lots of inbound links from affiliates, who often deep link into your product and category pages.

Getting links to pages other than your home page (known in the trade as “deep links”) isn’t easy, so this is a neat way to get other people to do a lot of the hard work for you.

Basically there are three ways you can go about setting up your affiliate campaign:

1. Create your own affiliate campaign
2. Use what I call an “affiliate portal” website
3. Use a combination of both

Creating your own ‘propriety’ affiliate campaign involves a bit of mucking around; you’ll need to install the software on your own server. I haven’t personally used this software, but I’ve heard good reports about iDevAffiliate. You’ll need to promote your own affiliate program yourself and wait for people who actually visit your site to sign up for your program themselves.

Affiliate portals such as clixGalore, Commission Monster and dgm Marketing allow you to create your campaign as a merchant, and they promote your campaign to a bunch of potential affiliates who are members of their networks. This is probably the easiest method if you’re just starting out. They manage all the tracking and payments on your behalf (for a fee of course).

Basically you’ll need to set up your promotions with banners and recommended text links, etc so that affiliates who join your program can cut and paste your links and banners into their own websites = instant links.

ClixGalore does allow for search engine friendly text links and linkable banners, as does commission monster, but at this stage dgm does not.

If you’re using a proprietary affiliate program, ideally you’ll also set your banners up so they have image alt text, which becomes anchor text for search engines when they view the link, so you can get the most ‘bang’ for your SEO buck.

Unfortunately, the affiliate portals that I’m aware of don’t provide image alt text settings for affiliate banners.

Anyway, the upshot to all of this is you’ll enjoy increased traffic from your affiliate links, deep links from their websites to your home page, category and product pages and hopefully, more online sales as a result of improved search engine ranking positions as well as your affiliate traffic.

With this strategy, everyone wins!

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.