Duplicate Content Defined

Google defines duplicate content as “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” This does not always mean that duplicating any web content will result in penalties, as is often thought. Look at sites such as www.PRweb.com, which distributes and reprints thousands of press releases on a daily basis. These press releases will be found in thousands of locations online, yet PRweb maintains its high PageRank. In fact, actually offering content for reprint can be a clever and effective way to generate traffic to your site. Visitors looking for content with reprint rights will go a long way to find ways to keep traffic coming to their site.

Implications on SEO?

It should be noted that copying any total webpage word-for-word, or worse still, copying the complete code of a website and claiming it as your own will indeed open you up to search engine penalties. These penalties can include reduced ranking for your site or complete delisting of your site on the search engine in question. However, copying articles with reprint rights as described above, taking small blocks of content or simply including a few quotes from online sources generally will not mean a penalty from Google or any of the other major search engines. When reprinting or borrowing any larger chunk of content, be sure to let the search engines know to ignore it by placing “robot” meta tags above and below the reprinted section.

When your Content has been Duplicated

If you find your copyrighted, exclusive content that you have not expressly indicated as being free for reprint has been posted on other sites, or if your entire site has been pirated and placed on another URL, it can be frustrating. To see if your content has been pirated or stolen, check sites like www.copyscape.com, which will scan your sites content and look for matches on the rest of the web. If you find someone has stolen your content, here are some steps to follow:

• Contact the webmaster and ask them to remove the stolen content.
• If this fails, refer to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and send Google an infringement notification.

Ways to Avoid Content Duplication

• Place a copyright (©) symbol on all pages of content.
• If more than one of your domains point to the same website and thus, the same content, use “permanent redirection”, a.k.a. a 301 status report to let the search engine spiders know you are not duplicating content. Learn more here: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

An affiliate program should be tailored so that it serves the needs of your business model, and not the other way around. A good benchmark is to achieve 30-40% of your online revenue from affiliate programs. If you start going beyond this benchmark, then you’re on the verge of taking on more of an affiliate role, and less of a merchant one.

Given that, you might then ask yourself what your retail philosophy is and then establish your priorities. It is good to have a clear idea of why you chose affiliate marketing and what kind of affiliates you are looking for as partners. Depending on how you answer these questions, chances are your philosophy
of affiliate marketing fits into one of three general categories.

Big Spender
Some merchants seek quick results, and are not afraid to put out the expenditure to get those results. They generally work with ‘super affiliates’ in an effort to maximize results quickly and create some buzz around their affiliate program. You’ll often find these merchants at industry conferences, and sponsoring parties at these events to educate affiliates about their program.
They often spend significant amounts of money to get the top-performing affiliates into their affiliate programs, and do so by offering high commissions, gifts and plenty of other incentives.
These programs can deliver results quickly. They also make it costly to maintain relationships, and your program may end up relying on just a few choice affiliates.

Relationship Focus
For brands that are looking for more of a longtail approach, building relationships is key to this strategy. Ensuring that affiliates have the right tools and all of the resources they need to effectively promote your products helps them to become better affiliates, which, in turn, increases your brand awareness and your profit margins.

These kinds of programs concentrate on reaching out to affiliates to give them support and guidance, as well as providing them with marketing tools, like banners and widgets.

A measured approach is sometimes used, in which trial periods can be utilized to evaluate an affiliate’sperformance. Once top performers are pinpointed, they are rewarded with better commissions. To do this, you will requirean advanced affiliate marketing software solution to track these metrics, and obtaining this type of software will also help to maintain the faith that affiliates have in the program.
Although your results may be somewhat gradual, creating relationships with your affiliates will help to provide better stability and a wider base of loyal affiliates.

Necessary Evil
Some merchants see affiliate marketing as a necessary evil. Their competitors are doing it, and it’s really just another sales tactic. When it is seen this way, little to no relationship is made with affiliates and they generally end up being viewed as freelance salespeople.

As a result of this, these programs have simpler commission structures that apply to all affiliates, with very little support and basic affiliate tracking software. While they require very little overhead, this approach makes it difficult to build a presence in the community, and especially difficult to attract super affiliates.

The Bottom Line
Affiliate marketing is a cost effective way to drive online sales. There are so many products and services available for sale on the Internet it can be difficult to make your mark in this marketplace. Shape your business model with this in mind and, consequently, your etail philosophy.

Your affiliate program should be shaped with that philosophy in mind. Without matching these two aspects of your business model, you’ll constantly be struggling to make one match the other, and may end up getting frustrated by the entire process. So, before attempting to establish the direction of your affiliate program, make sure to closely examine those original four points I brought up earlier:

* What is your retail philosophy?
* What are your priorities?
* Why did you choose affiliate marketing?
* What kind of affiliates are you looking to partner with?

Armed with the answers to these questions, you’ll be ready to create an affiliate marketing strategy that’s just right for your business.

By keeping communication channels open with your affiliates, you can both keep them informed of your latest promotions and reassure them that your affiliate program is a priority for your business. Draw on your experience from other marketing channels and consider all communication channels available to you, such as email newsletter, telephone, instant messaging, forums, blogs, conferences, etc.

To better understand what your affiliates needs, get to know them as you would your target market demographic. Research and analyze who they are, how long they’ve been an affiliate, what they market, and what their conversions rates are. This will help you determine what resources you can offer to enhance their experience and improve your shared results.

You may also consider participating in the affiliate community. By joining forums and monitoring blogs, you can get an understanding of the more holistic issues and identify community leaders who are often super-affiliates themselves.

Although affiliate marketing may be just one of many acquisition channels that your business leverages, it’s important to consider that affiliate marketing is also an industry unto itself. And like any other industy, who you know can often open many doors. Paying close attention to your affiliate relationships and investing in them, then, can help increase the ROI of your affiliate program by raising its good reputation and generating greater interest in it.

This is the fourth of five clips that our team put together after bringing a video camera in to one of our discussions. Here I discuss client relationships and how their needs factor into that relationship. It comes on the heels of my last interview about merchant-affiliate relationships, and I think it makes a perfect follow up. I hope you enjoy it, and look forward to any comments or feedback that you might have.

iPhone Version

Well, when I recently sat down with some of our team to discuss a variety of topics from affiliate marketing and relationship management to online community and the economy, they brought along a video camera. After having some fun with the footage, the team finally showed it to me, and I thought “what better place to put it than my new blog?”

Here is the first and five installments that came out of that session, and in it I discuss how changes can often mean new opportunities for businesses. I hope that you enjoy watching it as much I enjoyed doing these. Although I’m still a little uncomfortable with the format, I just might consider some more video in the future.

iPhone Version