Here’s a short guest post by Rich Gorman. You may be familiar with Rich from his marketing blog over at Direct Response. If you’re not familiar, check it out and add it to your reader. Regular quality content, ahoy.

When running media buys, around 15-25% of your traffic will Google your offer. These “due diligence” consumers search for an extra layer of validation due to their suspicious nature. Hence you want to make sure what they find is nothing but RAVING REVIEWS about the offer you’re promoting.

Here’s 3 tricks to owning page 1 of SERP results for your brands SERPs. By controlling the message, and listening to Finch’s tricks to affiliate marketing, you’ll see a significantly higher ROI on your buys:

1. Press Releases
Put out national press releases focusing on the exact match keyword in the title and strategically spread out throughout the body. Relate this news wire with something that’s important in your industry and try to tie it into national news.

i.e. I got a release listed on MSNBC last week, hence when people Google “Reputation Changer” they will see our reputation management brand has a listing from MSNBC ranking for it.

I suggest working with the following news wire outlets:

• PRNewsWire.com
• MarketWire.com
• PRWeb.com
• PR.com
• PRlog.com

2. Exact Match Domains With a Ratings Widget Installed

Buy exact match domains and install a ratings widget on them. Then recruit positive reviews and moderate them to show a 5 star rating in Google. Consumers will see this and automatically trust your 5 star service!

NOTE: Build links back to these sites, don’t buy links. Great ways to build links is via guest posts, press releases, and social media bookmarking.

3. Free Blog Sites

Deploy a number of free blog sites targeting the keyword that represents your offer. Here are some of my copy tricks when I rank blogs.

Here’s a list of 10 top notch free blog sites I target:

• WordPress.com
• Blog.com
• Blogger
• Typepad micro
• Jux
• Tumblr
• Posterous spaces
• Blogetery
• Weebly
• Livejournal

Finch: Some good ideas here. And particularly useful for those who have digital products and don’t want the first page of the SERP being dedicated to illegal downloads of their shit.

Recommended This Week

• Be sure to check out the Direct Response blog for a lot more from Rich. I like his posts. They’re just as angry as mine.

• Head over to Finch Premiums for the chance to save big on Volumes 1-4 of Premium Posts. Sale ends shortly when Volume 5 is released.