Good morning or afternoon as the case may be :-)

Mary, you ask fantastic questions that makes one think....lol  It is a good thing that after working 20+ hr days, I have had a bit of sleep..yay!

My opinion to your question is that you need to step back and first understand what search engines are, what affiliate marketing is and how does this play a role in advertising generally and specifically.
So lets look at these aspects.

Search Engines

Search engines are programs that search for significant words in pages stored in its database. Search engines use other programs (called spiders, robots or web crawlers) to search the Internet and retrieve pages and store them in its database. Some search engines are programmed to search a single web site or database. Meta-searchers are capable of searching multiple search engines at one time. Search engines are proprietary. This means that not all search engines are the same.

So what does this mean?

Crawler Search Engines
A Crawler search engine, like Google, ‘crawls’ or ‘spiders’ through your website and all it’s related links. This means that the spider will visit your website then read all the pages and follow all the links. Spiders usually return to your website every month or so to look for changes. Everything the spider finds goes into an Index.

The Index is like a large catalogue containing a copy of every webpage the spiders find in cyberspace. If your webpage changes, then the spider should find this change and update the Index. When you type in a keyword or phrase into a crawler based search engine the search engine software sifts through the millions of pages stored in the Index and gives you the results it believes is most relevant to your search query.

Most Crawler based search engines work in this way with minor changes to software, indexing etc. That is why if you type the same query into different search engines you can get varied results.

Directories
Directories differ from Crawler based search engines in that you, as a webmaster, submit a short description about your site, which is then categorized by humans. Search results are based on what is in the description about your site.

The reality Mary is that without a site, then getting noted by the search engines or "spiders" is a very difficult task if almost impossible.  Yes your name may get noted, but again I will say that unless you are very famous, who is going to look for you?

Affiliate Marketing

There are many definitions on the net concerning what affiliate marketing.  To my way of viewing and I am sure that some may not agree,  Affiliate marketing is being a commission sales person. This is cutting out all the hype and fancy words.  As owners of businesses we need you as an army to get the word out about our business and we pay you one way or another.  Being an affiliate to anything can and should be an honorable profession. The trick is learning all the ways and means to be the best you can be.  Affiliate marketing is a skill, that like anything requires learning, determination and enthusiasm.

Advertising

Advertising is just the way to get the word out about products and services, with the focus of getting customers.

Many if not all affiliate sites will give you different ways to tell people about their products, from signatures, ad copies of various length etc.   They have done the keyword research to help a person, get their products out.  It also helps them, in that ..and i wonder how many  people really understand...when they put these ad copies on their sites, they are optimizing themselves, so that their web site is getting indexed by the spiders, the search engines.

Should you be using that same ad copy?  Kind of a trick question in a way.  Like anything, when you first use an ad copy, it will be unique, but over time, if everyone is using the same thing, then to my way of looking at things, it gets old, stale and personally I ignore them.  I am very good at hitting the delete button.

My suggestion is to take what these business owners have created and change them to make them different.  Remember the whole purpose is to make yourself stand out, to make the products stand out.


Forum marketing is also a form of advertising, but your are or should be advertising YOU.  Adland has had so many people talk about the subject of throwing advertisements all over the place...gets a bit old doesn't it?

Did this help at all Mary?


I hope that you are well,

Best Regards,
Diane
Administrative Director
BlogNet Awards

Great response Diane.

One question, I think was not answered.  If I make a forum here and go to several other communities or  article  publish places and make the same ad or story, have I lost the power of the forum thread by repeating it?

Thank you for all the detail to facts which you have provided. All of the readers of this forum are getting a lot free information. 

This has the potential to assist many Adlanders as they promote their presence here.

You mention affiliates and the need to promote other than the affiliate site.  That is a huge problem as many cannot afford to build their own site.  As previously mentioned blogging or a squeeze page makes the site presentation more unique than promoting an affiliate that 150, 000 people are also promoting.

Hi Mary:

I think the best way to answer is this way -  One person writing the same ad and or article word for word on many forums, where you have for the most part the same contacts are going to look at anything you do as duplicate content....so yes you are going to lose the power (?) the purpose to any forum thread.

Get 100 people posting the same ad...all over the place...get 500 people posting the same thing all over the place...oh my!

Want to know my way of advertising?  developing a rapport with people.  It reminds me of a story I heard from some one not that long ago. 

This person went to a number of hobby shops in his area.  Every single one he went to gave the same type of hype..oh buy this...do that.  He left as he was not satisfied.   He then went into a hobby shop and there the owner came over and they talked, just general chit chat for a few, when the topic of why this person had come into the store to begin with came up, the owner listened. Instead of the sales hype of ..buy this..buy that... the owner sat this person down and explained what the product entailed, everything from costs over and above the product price, places he could go to enhance this product.  He told the good points and he told the bad points.  At one point, the owner apparently looked at my friend and said are you sure about this?   The long and the short was that my friend not only bought from this store, but has been a faithful customer for many years.

The man did NOT do the typical sales hype..the same words..he gave value.  He was unique, he cared for the customer. 

Whether we are on the net..or off the net, the same principals apply...wouldn't you agree?

You are right many people have little concepts to web sites  or even blogging for that matter, although one can learn.  There are many places where you can get free blogs, some better than others.   I am subjective of course, as I tend to tell people to get a free blog with us at Success BlogNet, but as with the owner of the hobby store, I would say to people, please do not go into blogging to advertise a product.  Blog to something you truly love and there are so many things to blog about.  Don't go into creating a blog and expect to make money of any kind right away...big mistake!  Blogs take time to build -  when i say that i mean it takes time to build content etc.

I believe I have now answered your question?


Guess what...we  got the Blogging Glossary up on our sites.. Tim and I are very very proud of this:  Feel free to link to this Glossary for the benefit of your readers.  


As always Best Regards to you

Diane
Administrative Director
BlogNet Awards

I have a main business where I make money, Magnetic Sponsoring, Mike Dillard's materials for bettering ones Marketing skills.  I am tempted to always hyperlink my business into ever post I make.

Then I have serveral promotional sites for advertising so I sometimes throw in one of those.

If I put my main business site in  most posts here in Adlandpro will I  saturate the scene and not get visited by the search robot?

My business is in my signature line so the opportunity is always there.  My question is would it be better to lighten up on the Magnetic Sponsoring link and connect to some fun and interesting sites just to get people here and hope they read my signature line?

You see I still have the mentality of advertise, advertise, advertise so I want the hyperlinks to go to my business.

Hello Mary,

The discussion seems to be progressing right along.  Some real good information and tips being shared.  One thing I would like to add and it always amazes me that folks put so much credence in where their name appears in the rankings when searched for using one's name.  I am not discounting the importance of the results especially if you or someone with the same name has an illicit past.  You could be surprised ;-)

What I would suggest is some introspect and review of the site that the search ultimately lands on. 

I know my site JimAllenIII.com needs a lot of work but I did get lucky and secured the dot com of my name so I am easy to find.  I need to focus more on this site in the future.

 But what other words being searched for will bring up your main site?  I have a Social Networking Community whose name has some great keywords in it like Learn and Earn and more.  But competition on those words is high.  So I named the site ULearn2Earn and try to focus on keyword phrases related to learning and earning and variations of the words and phrases.  Plus it helps to have folks active in the community which creates more exposure for us all.

Knowing what your site is about is all part of the Master Plan and getting it found using keywords related to your niche is key to getting you profiled. 

Great discussion so far Mary.