I use various strategies for affiliate marketing. One of more better strategies involve creating local blogs on local news websites, basically I create niche specific blogs (if local niche then even better), I then write blog post on topic which fester opinion and views — I always give a link to more details or where to purchase (if a selling item) which redirects through one of my domains to my affiliate links. These news websites usually have traffic levels over 100,000 sometimes over 1,000,000 — so the blog posts does get its fair share of traffic and click-throughs. I focus on making the blog as personal as possible with local references when I write, I upload a photo (some person pic from the public domain — male or female, it depends on what I’m selling), I add a description, fill out a complete profile, I respond to private messages (I even agreed to meet folks before — I’ve never been in their state) and I participate in commenting on other blogs and news stories. I also never promote anything until I have 15-20 posts. I operate over 100 of these external “covert affiliate” blogs and make at least one post a week on each (well, my hired content writers do). I don’t mind giving away the strategy because first of all its no secret for the guru affiliates out there, plus a lot of time and effort goes into it so many won’t last long enough to gain success, lastly without knowing specifically which niches work — well you know where I’m going with this!
Anyway, so I got my account disabled from one of the news networks where I have a blog hosted because I created a marketing campaign targeting a specific blog post on the network. I suppose what happened is this triggered a red flag and got my account banned!
It wasn’t for days I didn’t know the account was disabled. I blog approximately twice a week to the blog. I had a Google Adwords campaign pointing to various posts on the blog I advise not driving large amounts of traffic to your external covert operations! Especially, not through easily detectable pay per click links. This may seem like common sense to most, but to me it seemed like a strategy! Now, I have learned my lesson and have to learn my way around it! :-)
