Affiliate Marketing and SEO

One of the things I read a lot about with SEO and affiliate marketing is that using an affiliate program can drive you a huge range of SEO friendly links. In fact, some of the DIY affiliate solutions such as iDevDirect offer a SEO friendly URLs option.

The issue I have with this, as an affiliate marketer, is that you are trying to hard to get affiliate marketing to do multiple things. An affiliate program should be about generating sales of your product or service or attracting leads. In return you reward the affiliate with cash! It is that simple.

Having an affiliate program just as a way of adding links to your website is not really a good idea.
Affiliates who sign up to your program will feel hard done by.

Why?

Well basically they are promoting you and your business across the web and you are only paying them for the business they generate, they are getting nothing for the links or advertising they are doing for you.

It can end up being more damaging to your business.

So my advice would be to stick to the more tried and tested ways of adding links and only add an affiliate program to your business with the sole purpose of generating sales – not links.

Or use affiliate marketing to earn income and then reinvest that back into SEO!

Bio

Jason Hulott is a 14 year veteran of affiliate marketing and internet marketing. He now co-runs a Web marketing consultancy business in the UK servicing the Finance and Insurance markets. SpeedieAffiliates is a recent addition to their product offerings which can help affiliate marketers and affiliate managers with a range of affiliate marketing services.

P.S. Boston SEO Meetup co-organizer @BrianHawkins has launched a new Boston affiliate marketing Meetup202 networking event.