About the Demise of the Cookie

Cookies, those little text files websites place on user's browsers to track their online behavior, are quickly losing their gold standard as reliable, dependable and simple means by which marketers can better target their advertising. This, for the most part, is due to the proliferation of devices a single person uses and the fact cookies do not work in many mobile environments.

With the exponential growth of mobile devices- not to mention ad blockers- it has become challenging for marketers to obtain a clear picture of behaviour as it relates to their online behaviour. Paul Cimino, VP/GM of CRM company Merkle believes the cookie has four years of usable lifespan left).

But all is not lost for marketers when it comes to the cookie. There are several alternatives to cookie tracking that can help marketers retain what they will lose when the cookie rides off into the sunset as Clint Eastwood so often did in his spaghetti westerns.

Known identifiers, basically username and password, can reliably connect a user's activity to a website. Facebook login works in much the same way tying the user to their Facebook data. Stable identifiers, such as Apple's IFA and Google's new AdID, are proprietary platform solutions which aim to replace and improve upon cookie technology. And statistical IDs, basically cross-device tracking which ties a person to their device attributes such as IP address, OS, device type, fonts or user-agent, can aid in tracking as well.

If you work with an affiliate marketing agency, you will want to be sure they have tracking solutions that will work with and replace the functionality of today's cookie. One agency, AffiliateTraction, combines cookie tracking with batching and footprinting. Batching is the practice of accounting for missed affiliate sales by batching back transaction to networks so that what was missed can be picked up. Footprinting is a proprietary version of finger printing which is based on the early internet protocol, Finger, and modified to more closely follow Device Fingerprinting. One major benefit of footprinting is that it works on mobile devices where, in most cases, cookies do not. And footprinting leaves personally identifiable information out of the equation.

AffiliateTraction CEO Greg Shepard explains, saying, "Since the cookie is still the most popular we check that first, then if there is no cookie, we check a session and if there is no session, we check the footprint. A footprint is a subset of the data a finger print has. Most networks just use a cookie. For example, LinkShare has a session or a cookie. At AffiliateTraction, we use them all and what we track that networks miss we send back to the network to add those sales lost."

All of these new tracking technologies will help merchants maintain a complete picture of consumer behavior as they cycle through affiliate channels and the sales funnel. Make sure you have them in place. It is unlikely you will find comprehensive, triple redundancy-like tracking at a network. This is no slam on networks. It is just the way it is.

But if you are a merchant and want a clear overview of what is working and what is not in your affiliate program, working with a third party affiliate marketing agency will give you just that. It is the same thing big brands do on the traditional side. Coke does not work ad networks; they work through an ad agency which oversees the lion's share of their advertising for them. It should be no different in the affiliate marketing space -

See more at: http://performancein.com/news/2014/07/16/what-affiliate-marketers-need-know-about-demise-cookie/#sthash.uuuH7iNv.dpuf

Placing Banner Advertisements On Your Website

Placing banner advertisements on your website can increase your monthly revenue greatly. This option is better than being an affiliate for several companies because you will get one monthly fee no matter how many of your visitors go to the website or make a purchase.

The main thing is for you to create an informative website filled with useful articles, so that you can generate a high amount of returning visitors. As your site rises on search engine rankings, the blank space on your site will begin to look more and more appealing to advertisers.

Anyone can be an affiliate, but to have a banner placed in a good spot on a high-ranking website will bring in the most revenue for a company. Once you have established yourself as a site that can be profitable for them, you can rent out different spaces on your site for advertisers to place banner ads. Each month you will be paid the same fee, no matter how much they do or do not make off of you.

The Best Place to Place Affiliate Links on Your Website

Where you place your affiliate links on your website can really make a difference on how many clicks you end up getting and, since every click means a potential sale, this is an important aspect of internet marketing.

Research has shown that the most effective affiliate links are text links. Yes, plain text links. Not big flashy banner ads like most affiliate website are filled to the brim with. What happens is, you write a great article (or have one created) about the product or something related to the product and stick the link into your text. This allows interested readers to see the link as they are reading and click on it.

Of course, your article and your link have to work effectively together to make this happen. A bad article and an unrelated link to an unknown product are not likely to make the profits roll in.

So the next time you are out to choose an affiliate link, try placing a relevant link in a great article that is well optimized for search engines and see how it works out for you.

Keyword density and placement

Keyword density and placement are important parts of optimizing your articles for search engines. Search engine spiders scan a page in a way that makes it important to place your keywords where they will be detected and recognized as a keyword, so that your article will come up when someone searches for that keyword.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword. When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword.

Over Optimizing Your Articles

It is important to note that there is also such a thing as over optimizing your articles for particular words, this is known as “keyword stuffing”. When you stuff keywords in an article a spider will detect that you are trying to trick it into placing your article high in the search engine results for that word, and will instead penalize your site and your page for doing such. This may even affect the rankings of your other pages or get your site blacklisted from a particular search engine if you are found keyword stuffing too many times.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how many times your keyword is placed in your article. Most use a percentage to determine how many times they will put a keyword in an article. For instance, if you have a 500 word article and want to achieve a keyword density of 5%, then you will need to have the keyword in your article exactly 25 times. You can find hundreds of resources and guides recommending one keyword density over another and the reasons behind the logic, however, in the end you will have to determine which density is more profitable for your articles. Each webmaster as their own density that they like to achieve based on past results. As long as you don’t over optimize and you are making sufficient profit from your rankings, then you can choose whatever keyword density you like.

The Right Density

No matter what exact density you choose, it is important to place keywords so that there are more at the beginning and end to produce an hour glass effect. Having the right keyword density in your article makes it more likely that you will make money off of that article because it will rise in the search engine results and be seen by more people.