When I think of SEO, I think of ballbreaking keyword research and a drawn out link building program that could reduce a grown man to tears (or just a Black Hat manual). But the more money you spend on PPC, the more glaring it becomes that you’re paying to get your shit advertised alongside a bunch of free listings that are spitting out pure profit.

Now I know what everybody says. Link building? Writing articles? That, is the work of slavery, and damn near offensive to many.

Even beyond the attitude that it’s time consuming, boring work, and a waste of market knowledge – some affiliates seem to assume that it simply isn’t possible to catch up with the top rankers. Well, maybe you can’t work as hard as an army of Indian kids spinning out articles for $1 a pop. But you definitely can work smarter.

Through PPC, you can rapidly discover the keywords that produce regular sales. You do this by busting out your Adwords account, setting the crosshairs on a bunch of search terms, and then letting rip with your own money. Sure, you might lose money. But you can’t buy the knowledge that comes with knowing what sells.

Say you’re one of these organic search guys who lays down the foundations of an SEO campaign before a single sale has been banked. A good SEO campaign requires good targeting and good groundwork. You might spend 6 months optimizing a site of 300 pages to reach the top of Google for term “xxxxx”.

What if “xxxxx” doesn’t convert? Those 6 months would have been better spent on Redtube.

Coming from a PPC background, you can test the waters and find exactly which terms are converters. Get yourself 4 or 5 super targeted keywords, spin a domain out of them, and do your own SEO groundwork accordingly.

There’s no point wasting your own time on articles. But Christ, you wouldn’t believe how many affiliate marketers are so tight when it comes to paying a kid in Asia a small fee for getting some work done. If you’re truly enjoying the high life, employ a genuine professional and you’ve already got a competitive advantage over many of these top ranking sites.

Most affiliates build a successful campaign and ask themselves “how can I scale this bigger?”. Not many ask themselves “how can I reduce my costs?”

Reducing your costs will usually make a campaign more profitable than spreading your net and scaling upwards. I realized this after I noticed that I was making more money from a few organic sales than I was from 25 PPC sales in a day.

Fact is though, if you’re going to build long-term sites for your affiliate business – you’ve got one major problem.

How do you build a long term site for a short term product?

When I log in to Convert2Media, I see about 25 different Google offers. It looks a bit like this:

Google Profits
Make Money on Google
Google Money Profits
Profiting on Google
Google Income
Google Money Income

So how do you even think about building a site to rank naturally when the name of the shit you’re slinging is gonna change before you’ve opened the FTP to publish it?

I should say first of all that if you’re actually using the term “Google” when you push bizopp rebills, you’re walking in to a firestorm of legal problems. It’s blatant infringement on the Google brand. Even though the actual advertisers do it, why do you think we have so many Google bizopps in the first place? Rinse, say sorry, and repeat.

If you want to promote any kind of CPA rebill, you’re going to have to build your own brand and focus only on the terms that don’t change over time.

Sure, “acai burn” might be a popular search term today – but there’s no guarantee that it will be tomorrow. “Cure my fat ass” on the other hand, is always going to be a go’er, because let’s face it. America is fat.

For long term success, you need to be targeting the keywords that are here to stay. Ranking takes time and it isn’t really a good fit for the cut throat nature of the CPA industry.

The safest way to build a long term future in affiliate marketing is to target sales instead of leads. You can’t fuck with the quality of a sale. But that doesn’t mean we all have to bend over backwards and become bitches of Commission Junction. There’s still money to be made from long term sites pushing short term offers. That’s if you get it right from the beginning.

I see quite a few guys trying to build review sites for dieting, cleansing and whatever else is pulling a $37 commission. I can only imagine that they’re PPC burners, because it doesn’t make sense as a long term goal otherwise. These CPA offers are getting rebranded practically every day. You need to target the needs of the market, not the product on the shelf.

People will bitch and moan about these issues until they’re blue in the face. But you’ve gotta know what you’re dealing with before you throw the toys out of the pram. And most publishers refuse to see both sides of the story.

No affiliate likes being scrubbed, and no affiliate likes getting the shave-o treatment. But it happens and it’s probably happening to you right now.

Scrubbing is a widely used tactic by both networks and advertisers. You might never know that your leads are getting scrubbed until it reaches such a point that your profits are turning in to losses. On the network side, this works by simply scrubbing out some of your leads. You might be pushing through 100 leads a day, but only 95 are showing up in your stats because there’s a 5% scrub going on behind the scenes.

The network will usually only resort to scrubbing if it’s concerned that the quality of the leads you’re sending is low. I’ve heard of advertisers striking up contractual agreements that a scrub is applied across the boards to every affiliate on that network for a particular offer. This is generally a precaution taken to compensate for the poor leads that a certain set of publishers might be sending.

Zip submits and short email submits are the widely used example of a vertical which has been brought to it’s knees by excessive scrubbing. If you push a lead through which is already registered on the system, you’re going to get scrubbed. If your leads don’t meet the quality criteria that the advertiser has in place to make a tidy profit, they’ll scrub you until the margins add up.

As for shaving, this is a much darker area. Once again, it happens with both advertisers and networks. While most of us affiliates who’ve been doing this for a while have come to expect advertisers shaving leads, you can bet that there’s gonna be a backlash if it’s discovered on the network side.

Shaving is where the advertiser simply doesn’t report a certain percentage of leads. It can get even murkier when you start having networks taking a cut to go along with the shaving – and yes, ultimately it’s the affiliate who gets fucked over.

It’s long been suggested that Direct Track – one of the most popular systems used for lead tracking – has a built-in function which can automatically shave leads to a set percentage. I can’t speak on the subject for sure because I’ve never had access to the software and I’ve heard mixed reports on that being the case. Don’t be fooled though. Many advertisers will REFUSE to run an offer with a network unless there’s a percentage of leads shaved from the final payout.

More recently, some of the lesser known networks have gotten real aggressive when it comes to using the scrub and shave tactics. But they do it in such a way that you’ll barely notice a difference in your profit margins. They do it by simply offering higher payouts.

What’s the number one way to bait a fresh inexperienced affiliate? It’s probably something along the lines of “Oh hey dude, we offer the same Acai berries, but with a few extra bucks thrown on top.”

The affiliate thinks he’s getting a stellar deal and switches network. Now the network has to balance the books and actually sustain it’s own margins. So what you’ll normally see is a small but significant scrub. The affiliate won’t notice a massive change because although the conversion percentages are down, the higher payout keeps everything even. The network wins because that’s one more affiliate working for them that would have been working for somebody else.

Network issues like this are generally pretty straight forward to resolve. You should be actively split testing your offers to see how they perform when funneled by different networks. You could spend a whole year promoting Offer X and making $2.50 EPC, only to switch to a different network and see it bumped by 30 or 40 cents. Those margins add up over time.

It’s also important to network and stay in touch with affiliates who are working the same verticals. Believe me, put a bunch of guys making $xx,xxx/day in the same chat window and they’ll soon smell a rat when a network starts getting dirty.

I try to avoid the issue by only working with networks where I know the guys at the top are just as serious as the affiliates when it comes to these type of issues. I recommend Convert2Media on the simple basis that Ruck will fuck any advertiser that tries to put a foot out of line straight up it’s ass.

So what can we actually do about the bigger picture as affiliates?

Step one – look at things from the advertiser’s perspective.

This entire system is not designed to fit in with an affiliate’s ROI. We are the tiny fish in a massive pond. While it’s feasible that lawsuits could be bounced around where proof is had, you’ve gotta understand that the affiliate is much lower in the food chain than the network and the advertiser.

The only real way we can negotiate the scrub and shave is by providing what the advertiser really wants. What the advertiser is paying your ass to bring in the first place…quality leads.

You’re never going to weed out the shadiest advertisers who scrub for the sake of greed, and shave for the sake of upgrading a yacht. But in many cases, the advertisers are resorting to underhanded tactics because affiliates are providing low quality leads.

Low quality leads? How do we know what we’re sending? It’s all just sales and clicks right? No, it all goes back to the presell. How honest have you been in promoting an offer?

I was promoting an offer which was converting around 14% just a month or so ago. Without any warning, that dropped to under 5% overnight. I wasn’t the only one. Wickedfire members caught on pretty quick and it soon became apparent that one particular advertiser had decided to pull the shave-o trigger. This royally decimated the EPC’s for a lot of high flying affiliates. It happened on a reputable network so I think we can say for sure that the advertiser was acting on it’s own accord.

Of course, this just so happened to coincide with a warning that was sent out to all networks about promoting more than one offer on a page. To use the Google bizopps as an example, many affiliates decided to upsell an eBay work at home opportunity. Worse yet, some idiots decided to promote TWO Google bizopps on the same page in a way that suggested that the customer somehow needed both products to get maximum value.

Now, issuing a rebill on a Google offer is pretty unnecessary in itself. The information is all there once you make the purchase. You’re not getting anything new at the end of every month. Misleading customers in to signing up for two of the same thing…it’s kamikaze marketing if you give a shit about the quality of your leads.

Can you imagine how pissed off that customer is going to be when he discovers that he’s being charged $150 or so monthly for two products when they’re essentially the same and he’s getting nothing extra for his subscription in the first place?

Naturally, that customer is going to be on the phone canceling his order faster than you can refresh stats.

Cancellations and poor quality leads might seem pretty irrelevant to you. It doesn’t matter if a customer cancels if you get your $36, right?

That’s a completely destructive attitude to have as an affiliate. Can you blame the advertiser for wanting to shave the hair off your ass if you’re sending them leads that are not only going to cancel, but are going to be ranting expletives on the phone while they do so?

No, the advertiser is soon going to catch on. That’s exactly what happened recently when my conversions fell from 14% to 5%.

The advertiser looked over their financial sheets for the last few months and did some high school maths. They obviously decided that a little shaving was necessary to boost profit margins and that’s exactly what they did. A few affiliates taking a completely destructive approach to acquiring leads via any means necessary completed raped the rest of us out of the market.

Widespread shaving on that level is quite rare. But if you don’t want to be target number one when the advertiser points at a subid to shave in to the ground, take a little more pride and care over the leads that you’re sending. If they’re not good for the advertiser’s business, believe you me, they’re not good for YOUR business. And we’ll all feel the consequences as a result.