SEO Strategies for Affiliate/MLM Marketing Web Sites

Just $79 down and $49 a month gets you your own affiliate business!!! This headline sounds too good to pass up, especially since you are told the fees include your own website and virtual back office. “This is great”, you say so that you can sell online “in your sleep.”

That would be true, as 24/7 availability of the Internet allows for sales any second of the day. What you may not realize is there are 30,000 to 60,000 or more affiliates or multi-level marketers (MLM) just like you trying hoping to catch the eye of random Internet visitors using a web page served up from the company’s main site. For example, “your” website URL is probably similar to www.SiteMadeSimple.com/12345, In this URL format, the page to which you refer customers is not really your site. Your company is allowing you a page or placeholder on their site.

If you do a search on the type of product or service you sell, or the company’s name, the top result belongs to that of the company and then a few hundred other affiliates like you. “But where is my site”, you ask? Off in a black virtual hole, probably without a chance to be seen in top, mid, or low ranking without optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the phrase used to represent the effort to boost a website’s ranking in search engine results. Briefly, SEO involves multiple components, the main part being the ability to create and manipulate the structure and data needed to optimize a website.

When you don’t own your page or site, typically the way affiliate marketing and multi-level marketing works, you do not have access to the areas needed in order to facilitate SEO. “So what’s an affiliate or MLM to do?” Great question! There are simple solutions at varying price ranges.

At the least, you should have your own domain name that references the type of business opportunity or product. Be careful here as some affiliate and MLM programs do not allow the use of their name by anyone else. With our previous example, this would mean you could not use www.buySiteMadeSimple.com as your domain as it is built off of company’s domain. You would use your own domain and then point it to the URL provided by your company.

The next part is developing your own page, or portal, leading to your company page, or even developing your own website. Be careful here as some affiliate and MLM programs limit the use of their name, branding and product information in sites other than their own. If this is the case, there are still creative ways to present the information without violating policy.

Last of all, you need to optimize your completed page, portal or site and update your SEO on your website on a frequent basis.

That’s it and then you are off and running in the virtual world. Please note that a new page, and even an optimized page, does not show up in search engines or have increased rankings and traffic automatically. It depends on the additions to the engines and the strength of your SEO, which can have different timeframes.

Don’t give up on your affiliate dream (making money while you sleep). Instead, implement the strategies outlined above. has created pages and complete sites for affiliate and MLM marketers with great success. We have cost-effective strategies for this and other Internet business issues. We would love to help you make the most of your business.

Christine Burke is the owner of , an Internet marketing company. Christine holds a Master's degree in Organizational Management and teaches at the Maricopa Community Colleges. Christine has a great interest in helping businesses succeed and supports the entrepreneurial community in the Scottsdale and Phoenix area through