Remember that if you add an email list to your website, you’ll need to comply with CAN-SPAM. That means no selling of people’s emails, and no sending to people who don’t “opt-in” or agree to participate, and allow them to opt out. But, for pennies an email, you can get your own email management program that will help you take care of many of the CAN-SPAM compliance issues.

For those of you who think this is not relevant to affiliate marketing, think again.  Verizon claimed that showing competitve ads on these pages was defrauding the public, and well, cybersquatting.  That means, if you think you’re going to buy a brand name and turn it into a landing page or redirect as part of googles adsense or some other affiliate program, you might want to check the fine print before you end up as part of one of the lawsuits.  Brand names can be a very sticky situation, because you’re not the trademark holder. 

Btw, this doesn’t only happen to big guys.  Yours truly recently received a letter in the mail demanding a domain name be turned over immediately to it’s “owner” because of trademark infringement.  I had been a member of said company’s affiliate program, and, the worst part was, the domain didn’t even make a profit, so i stopped using it and turned off the auto-renew.  

Just a warning to all of you affiliate marketers!!

Here’s a suggestion. Think of something you like to do - is it watch sports, ride mountain bike, play wii? Or maybe you are an expert at hacking madden 2009.  All of these things involve merchandise of some kind that’s saleable.  Could you sell fantasy football guides, Madden 2009 hacks and  team updates,  recommend the best bicycle parts, or show how your wii has helped you lose 50lbs? 

Now that you have a plan, start selling!

Make sure in your comparison sites that you are comparing apples to apples. People can easily see through big leaps. Also, visually show the winner via a star rating or check marks.  This will make it easy for shoppers to visually san and compare.

• Relevant Content
• Links
• Good Keywords

Lets start with links - these are easy. The more links, the higher you’ll rank in google. Well, sort-of. We’ll talk about that later. But basically more is better. And the bigger, cooler the site you’re linking from, the more your link counts.Good Keywords. Ok, this is REALLY important. I don’t care what you are building a site about, if you don’t pick a good keyword, you aren’t getting anywhere. Picking a good keyword just means pick a keyword that people actually search for.Relevant Content - I always thought this was common sense, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people ask why their site doesn’t rank for something that’s not ON the page.

Ok, that’s the 101 crash course. If you want to conquer SEO, I highly recommend Brad Callan’s SEO Elite

The answer is not always as clear cut as it may seem. In the world of stocks the advice is “go with the best of breed”. That is to say that the company that performs best will continue to offer the best performance. Logically, this seems to hold true with affiliate marketing. The companies that offer perceived best value and perceived best brand will tend to out perform a no name brand almost all of the time, even if the no-name store pays 2-3 times the commission.

However, when playing with products that can be purchased at many stores, one always has to be aware that people will price compare and look for the best deal. The bottom line is test / restest and don’t hold on to a single advertiser because it’s your favorite place to shop.