Learning how to Affiliate Profitably Post Penguin and Panda

Learning how to affiliate profitably post Penguin and Panda has been made much more difficult since the recent Penguin and Panda updates by Google.

Many well-known and familiar names in the affiliate world have been downgraded by Google to the extent that some of their websites are no longer on the first page of a Google search. This has caused them a huge loss of income and in some instances, has wiped out their affiliate marketing businesses.

Losing one’s income is a huge emotional blow as well as a financial loss and the extreme hardship this may cause to those who were barely making an income online through affiliate marketing, is causing them to have a massive strategy rethink about their future in Internet marketing.

In fact, many Internet marketers will now decide that the effort and constant algorithm changes that Google makes, simply isn’t worth the uncertainty of income and work effort that gets wiped out overnight.  Building a website takes time, thought and planning. To see it disappear off the first page of Google search results and into the realms of obscurity through technical ignorance is disheartening.  

Mind you, I agree with the clean-up that Google is doing because there are way too many technically capable “shonks” who game the system and spoil it for all the not-so-technically capable but often more honest webmasters who simply like a product enough to want to sell it to others.There will always be people who do the wrong thing but this doesn’t, nor will it ever, make it right. As the old saying goes “Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should”. 

While I agree with Google’s clean-out of scummy and useless websites in their search results, I believe that the time will come when a computer science degree will be required to make a living as an affiliate marketer.  

Google has indicated numerous times on various platforms that they don’t like affiliate marketers.

 Aside from the legitimacy of these assertions and even overlooking the fact that it is these very affiliate marketers who have driven Google through their Adwords system to become the leading search engine on the Internet; they still don’t like them using their search engine to market products that can easily be found on the originator website. 

So to learn how to affiliate profitably post penguin and panda means that you really need to pay more attention to detail and unique content to actually add value to the product or service via informative reviews that can only be found on your website and you need to make these reviews totally unique by adding better “how-to” or “another way to” use the product or service. 

Website Design

Over the past 5 years that I have been working online, web site design and functionality has changed enormously. Check this video out:

When I first contemplated working online I had to learn Dreamweaver or Frontpage. XSitePro or blogs hadn't been invented then! Now, dreamweaver is best left to the geeks among us, Frontpage has gone off somewhere and sulked because it is hardly (if ever) used and XSitePro has become the program of choice for those who absolutely must have a static website...and there is often need for one of these.

The website building tool of choice today is definitely Wordpress blogs. There are of course others like Joomla, Drupal etc...but far and away, wordpress is the king of website tools because you can do so much with it design-wise.

As an affiliate marketer, you will need to know both a WYSIWYG static html platform and a blogging platform. 

Ethical Email Marketing

Ethical email marketing can only happen if the list owners are ethical small business owners. We have all signed up to someone’s list to receive more information about a subject that has interested us. Most have had a notice below the subscription sign-in box clearly stating that our email address would be safe and would never be sold or abused.

Giving full credit to the majority of internet marketers working online this has been the case. But what has happened with the other 1%?  Leaving spam-bots out of this equation for once, there are some unethical marketers out there who sell their unsubscribed list once they are no longer active list members.

So what are Ethics in this instance? 

Ethics are holding to your word regardless of changed circumstances.  Just because someone for whatever reason, has unsubscribed from your list does not mean that your word of “no selling or abuse in any way” is no longer applicable. 

Once you have said something or given ‘your word’ that something won’t happen, then you change the conditions without warning when your relationship changes, is simply unacceptable behavior and constitutes unethical marketing. 

Just because you have their email address but no longer need it, does not mean that your promise isn’t applicable any more. A promise is a promise and you have already said what you will and won’t do with their email address. You have implied that it will never be sold or abused and this written promise is exactly what any ethical marketer will honor. 

Now if you had said in your subscription box that after unsubscribing from this list, that your email address may be sold or re-used by someone else that would have been ethical. Probably very impractical because no one in their right frame of mind would ever sign up! 

Trust and truth are implied when you say something, and totally destroyed when you break your word.

Trust and Truth

Are very fragile conditions even in the “real” world, but when you can’t see people face-to-face to assess the character of a person it becomes even more difficult and so there are many more people who have their trust betrayed by unethical people. 

List Sellers

Unethical marketers who sell their unsubscribed lists are adding to their own problems if they are also list buyers. Just because your list may have come from a group of gym-junkies and that is what their interests were, if you sell your small list to a list buyer and they are short of a few hundred email address at some point, guess what they are most likely to do? That’s right, they will add your email list of gym-junkies into whatever list they are short on numbers for and sell your list that way. They have already proven to be unethical so what is to stop them doing that?

List Buying 

List buying may look like the fast track to a perceived end but the end is too often very different to what you’re hoping it will be. To buy email addresses to market a product to, that the person has not specifically requested, is much like buying “a pig in a poke” as you are not target marketing your efforts and money to an audience who may even be just a little bit interested in what you are trying to sell them.  

Just because you think you are buying a list of chiropractors, accountants, dentists or internet marketers or any other professional list doesn’t mean that those email addresses actually belong to someone in a market that you are trying to reach. Just because someone says they do, doesn’t make it so. 

Unethical email marketing simply annoys people; the spam filters, the search engines and gives other internet marketers a ‘bad name’ so is it worth the price?

Finding the Right Mentor

Sometimes it takes a long time with a lot of mis-starts to find the right mentor. A mentor is someone very special and not every would-be guru can be described as a good mentor.
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In truth, very few 'gurus'  make good mentors. Gurus are usually the path-finders but because they can show you the path doesn't mean they can guide you along it. The real problem with internet marketing today is that there are too many 'wanna-be' self-acclaimed gurus who are only too willing to lead you down the garden path instead of the path to happiness and a successful internet business path to reach your destiny! 


My suggestion to everyone is to first google them and to find what others have to say. Then take that with a pinch of salt and go to the Warrior Forum to see what your peers have to say about their products or services. 


All I'm suggesting is that you take extreme care before you run yourself broke.

Do Some Registry Cleaners Sell Unethically?

Registry cleaners are usually looked for at a time when a computer user has a serious problem. Is it ethical or unethical to use this time to encourage them to take some course of action to fix their problem? Then when they do, after waiting to have their registry scanned to find out what the problem actually is, to then hold them to “ransom” to get the problem fixed?

When a computer doesn’t work properly and you can almost feel some virus ripping out your hard done work, to say to a computer owner “if you want this fixed, I can do it but it’s going to cost “X” amount of dollars first?  Personally, this leaves me feeling abused.

These registry cleaners promise they will scan and clean your registry. So the reader believes them and takes them at their word, has their computer scanned and the scan comes up with ’10,000’ infections found. Then to clean these out, we will do it but first you have to pay “$X.XX” to do so.

Many of us feel as if they have us over a barrel, bite the bullet and buy the product. This is precisely the buying position these registry cleaner suppliers want us to be in. Is this selling ethically though?  I say no. Why?

Breaking someone’s arm to buy something can hardly be considered an ethical sale.  By breaking someone’s arm, well, in this case their computer, to get a sale can hardly be considered as an ethical way of doing business and making the sale.  Their lack of integrity in the first place is definitely questionable but then to find my computer held to ransom makes me feel not only annoyed but disgusted.

Often this unethical behavior is compounded by seeing that the numbers don’t match up.

Prior to purchasing the product under extreme duress, the original scan that showed ’10,000’ infections found, suddenly get downsized to ‘2000’ infections cleaned and removed. So not only has the registry cleaner provider held you over a barrel to buy their product, they have outright lied to you about the number of problems that your computer actually had. By this time though, your computer is working again and you do feel extreme relief. Until twelve months later, anyway.

The next reminder of this incident comes when you check your monthly credit card statement. There you see a payment made to “ABC Registry Cleaner”. When you go back to the registry cleaner’s site, you then get to read the small print that clearly says there is an annual fee associated with buying the product.

So the purchase that you were ‘forced’ to make isn’t an outright buy. You are only buying the product for one year’s usage but why couldn’t that be clearly stated at the time of being ‘forced’ to purchase? We all understand that constantly upgrading the virus base is required.

Good ethics in business is essential. Integrity is part of being ethical and if customers feel that they have not been treated fairly, they will simply walk away and be sure to” bad mouth” your business to anyone who is likely to listen. You may have made the sale but by doing it unethically you lost more than you may ever know. 

Affiliate Marketing Help when Using Audio

Have you ever been quietly surfing the internet and clicking through following links that are in line with your interests only to be startled out of your enjoyment by a loud voice seemingly coming from nowhere?

This has happened to me once too often and it near scares the wits out of me! I live alone and enjoy my quiet solitude learning and doing the things that interest me. When I am researching a topic that I need more information for, my focus is strong on learning new information. When I'm suddenly scared witless I am off that website so fast Jack Brabham would be envious at the speed of my mouse. Oh, in case you don't remember who Jack Brabham is, he is one of Australia's famous formula racing car drivers who has long since retired. But he was fast!

When a web site publisher doesn't pay their viewers the respect they deserve by giving them an actual choice first to listen to an audio message or not, but it is programmed to start up immediately or after 3 seconds or whatever, this is so bad mannered it is unbelievable. When you treat people with such little respect, why would they want to give you any more time?

I believe audio recordings used in this way are doing more harm to a persons credibility than they fully understand. Not only is your website seared into the memory of the noise recipient of "danger, danger, danger" but you never actually ever get a chance to sell or inform them of anything!

So if you have trialed an audio recording on your website to start after a set time instead of when the person clicks to hear the recording if they want to, perhaps it's time to go in and do a bit of re-programming before it becomes way too late. That way, you will have a far better chance of people actually hearing your audio message.

Develop a Web Site

Building a web site doesn't end once it's published on the internet and available for all the world to see. Now any good web master worth their salt will develop it to a point that people world wide can find it.

When you first start out and publish your first web site, you feel such a sense of accomplishment that one tends to sit, stare, admire, tweak, test all the links and then email it off to all their friends in their contact list hoping everyone else will admire it and send it on to people in their address book. Well, that was how I felt and behaved and months later, I could hardly find my own web site on the internet.

So I built more and more web sites and still had the same problem of no visitors. It would seem that I was doing more than a few things wrong . I soon stopped sending any web sites off to family and friends because I never heard back from most of them and according to my Statcount tracker, precious few had visited. So, one aspect of my internet business had been accomplished in that I had learnt how to build a web site but I had to start looking for the missing links to fix the traffic situation. What had been happening was that I was building "all singing and all dancing" web sites that didn't please the search engines or anyone looking for what I had to offer.

I soon learnt that designing and making a web site is only part of the web site developing process.

I would consider web site design and building a most basic skill because even if you can get traffic to a web site, unless you can build, alter, add, subtract from one you can never really "own" one. But unless you learn to develop one it doesn't matter how many web sites you "own" because none of them will be successful.

To develop a web site needs a lot of time, love of tweaking and testing, writing or out sourcing articles to build, enlarge or market the web site. If your web site is to be an authoritative source of information then it has to be added and increased incrementally. The search engines are quite specific about what they consider an authoritative site and seeing a whole bunch of 'stuff' dumped into it from time to time doesn't equate with their algorithm at all.

So to develop a web site is first started by designing and publishing it to the world wide web and then developed by adding more information and visitors steadily over time.

Affiliate Marketing is Harder than You Think

When you first start out working on the Internet the first thing you seem to come into contact with is affiliate marketing. It seems that everyone who has ever created a product has an affiliate pro gramme to go with it. There's obviously a very good reason for this and that is because from the owner/producer of the of the products perspective, they need affiliates to increase their sales. And it is a good system because it does work. It works for the owner/producer of the product and it works for a handful of affiliates. From the newcomer's perspective they need to get themselves into that handful of affiliates for whom affiliate marketing works. This is a lot harder to do than you think

Once an affiliate marketer reaches the handful of what has become known as 'super affiliate' status, then they do start to really make the money. To get to this point though it takes a lot of mistakes, a lot of learning new programme's and skills and a determination that is uncommon. The question every new affiliate person needs to ask themselves before outlaying time or money is "do I have the ability to do this?" Ability in this instance means the determination to stay the distance to get the job done and the ability to learn all the new skills required.

One of the skills required is the ability to make your own websites. Many affiliate programme's tell you that you don't need these skills because they provide the website for you. And they do but it is what I have learnt to call a 'generic site' where all that products affiliates have the same website because they can't personalise it or make it individual so in the end Google looks at it and they see they have 9000 of the same websites in their index so they start to de-index sites. So if you fall under this category you have virtually been wiped out of the game.

That is only one of the most basic problems facing a 'newbie' affiliate marketer so if you want to learn some of the mistakes so that you don't make the same ones then you need to hear the other side to all the hype that is on the Internet today.