Lately, my peeve has been people who are ruining the good image of internet marketers. Everyone knows we are a highly respected bunch. Hey, I kid, I kid.

But seriously -- as far as internet marketing goes, the people who want to "get rich quick" make the rest of us look even worse. So my advice to you is: put some effort into it.

I'd venture to guess that most of those who just throw up some crappy site in hopes of  wrangling in some extra bucks don't end up making the kind of money that people like my friends and I do. That's because they end up getting Google Slapped or some business like that or their site gets swiped because it's so simple.

And the worst part about it- in the past, it's caused Google to crack down on sites that are low in quality or even slightly low in quality. A good analogy would be to relate it to the real estate market. One site goes down and because that was closely related to another, the sites around it get penalized for having similar qualities, even if they are technically within guidelines.

My point is simple: create quality and you most likely won't get slapped. The side benefit is that your minimum bids will get lowered for more competitive terms and you'll be able to compete with the big boys.

To create quality, I recommend writing articles or having articles written for you on the topic you're marketing. Additionally, you should provide a contact page and ideally, a blog to house the aforementioned articles. (Note: You may want to turn comments off). This will get your site indexed a little more thoroughly. On top of that, it's good to have things like a terms of service document as well as a privacy notice (if you collect information). This will help in a few ways: Google likes sites with more pages, Users trust sites with more pages and it's just a better way of doing business.

Remember: it is an actual business, so things like this matter.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 8:15 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.