Hard News and Image Lookup for Affiliate Marketing
This article is guest posted by Riley Kissel
Although many successful bloggers are using different affiliate marketing techniques to build stronger relationships with their clients and increase traffic flow through to their website, the majority of traditional techniques are soon to fall by the way-side because they’re too predictable.
Rewarding online followers with gifts and other incentives for clicking and browsing is soon to become trite and overrated. The new hot approach to affiliate marketing is going to be using less-traditional modes like the reverse phone lookup of Anywho.com and the image lookups.
Reverse phone-lookup allows the user to find names, addresses, and businesses that they could then use on map searches or image searches, while the image lookups allow bloggers to add visual appeal to their websites and connect photos and images to content within their website on a particular subject matter.
The thing that makes image lookups so powerful is that for those who like using affiliate marketing to generate traffic, the blogger can use images to find topics to talk about or use images to compel online readers to click certain keywords within articles that the reader would have before ignored (without a shadow of a doubt).
When using image lookup systems, because search engines cannot read images (at least not just yet), in order for the images to be ranked, the system has to look for clues, which seems a little more cumbersome. Also, to successfully incorporate images, it is a good idea to keep one image per/page and to link the image with the keyword anchor text link with the same similar word-choice.
What I mean relating the image to the text is that each image should have a caption that uses some if not all of the same words as the hypertext associated with the blog. This way each reader is attracted to both the image and the text almost simultaneously.
It is also important that all images are readable when reduced to a thumbnail. It seems that the best use of image lookup with affiliate marketing will be when the subject matter applies to hard news and other more serious projects or when bloggers wish to connect to government entities and/or non-profit organizations.
Just as in writing or anything else, it is clearly important and critical to be selective in the images used with affiliate marketing and to limit the amount of images associated with a particular blog. The images should not take away from the written word or conflict with the writer’s intention or message. Any image that would distastefully create a negative image for your blog should not be included.
It’s going to be interesting how images take over the written word in the blog world and how blog-writers and the relationships they create with their clients will have to deal with the new sensation of having to use visual appeal to increase web traffic consistently.
