Welcome to another SEO roundup, we’ve got a lot on this week so get your notepads and pens out and get ready to spend some time doing quality SEO research.

On the bill this week we have the latest news announcement from Yahoo, link buying advice from SEOMoz, some great advice on how to get Wikipedia out of your way and Googles first steps into voice recognition based search.

We also have a nice overview of PubCon 2008 from Michael Gray that you would do well to read after this.

Time (as well as many other sources) reported this week that Jerry Yang, long time CEO of Yahoo is stepping down. He co-founded the company 13 years ago and yahoo has certainly seen some ups and downs in that time. It’s currently in one of it’s weakest positions but the search engine is still one of the most popular in the world and remains tight lipped about where it will go next.

This may be a big deal in the future as Yang was allegedly one of the big players in initially turning down Microsoft’s buyout offer. With Yang stepping down maybe Microsoft will re-open the deal or even Google, the new year will be a very interesting time for Yahoo as a company and the search engine market.

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SEOMoz put a great blog post up this week based on a PubCon talk relating to link buying.

While some of the ideas may be slightly out of reach for us as smaller affiliate marketers it certainly won’t hurt to see what Rand has to say, maybe some of the techniques will instantly appeal to you but its going to be a personal difference thing.

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Blue Hat SEO threw up a great post about how to combat Wikipedia when it is outranking you in the SERPs. As always with the Blue Hat SERO Blog, Eli posts and ideas are often quite compl;ex and rewarding but they do sometimes stray from the White Hat Path.

Employ them at your own risk but do so after reading the whole post and researching what it means, a lot of the time tactics aren’t black hat they are just not white hat, there is a difference.

Being able to overpower Wikipedia is great and in many affiliate verticals so definitely give it a read.

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Finally if you like you SEO served with a side of gadget you’ll love this.

Google have now revealed their new iPhone app that runs searches based on voice recognition. I am going to link you to the Matt Cutts’ review of the technology instead of Google official post because the explanation is much better.

So apart from being cool what does voice recognition on the iPhone have to do with SEO and affiliate marketing?

Because it is the start of a new technology. Voice recognition has been creeping into computing for decades now to the point where XP and Vista actually have the functionality but it is rarely used. If this tech gets more and more accurate it will become more and more popular until it is the primary UI.

Once this happens we will see a HUGE change in search behaviour. I am sure there are crazy essays out there by Doctors of various field analyzing this possibility but from my opinion we would have two major things to be keep an eye on;

1)    Less people will actually search.

Why? Because a whole bunch of people only use search engines because they are unsure of the official source of something, while this is not really a huge concern for affiliate marketing as it is generally a retail or reference search it still means less people to catch with PPC and craft organic rankings.

If some one could just say “visit official Lego site” the browser would just go. No search needed.

2)    More long tail stuff.

People are lazy, typing is hard work compared to speaking, I predict we would see a lot more longer tailed searches, “2008 Man United Football kit” instead of “Man u kit” its common sense people would refine their searches with less effort.

Watch out for slang appearing more too!

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Finally we have a great overview on PubCon from Michael Gray, check his post out at your leisure unless of course you were lucky enough to attend!

It was defiantly another big year for the conference with a lot of major new ideas coming up so be sure not to miss out on them.

Time for another SEO roundup! How is the SEO going this week? There have been reports of a few affiliates seeing terrible drops and even rumours that Google were directly targeting affiliate marketing websites.

I’ll lay this to rest right now, it’s simply not true. There has been activity over the last few weeks but it’s been across the board and in retrospect, most of it is no worse than it usually is.

Keep your white hat on and make your your site is not “thin” and you’ll stand a much better chance of retaining those ranks or gaining them in the first place.

Here are my recommended reads this week.

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Top Rank Blog have this excellent list of Blog and RSS directories on their site. It’s really useful if you don’t already have a reliable list of blog directories and while these kind of sites are coming and going all the time there are plenty of strong, older ones on there.

As I’m sure you already know directory submission is not what it once was so be careful not to over-do it all at once, maybe 10-20 a week and they will be approved slowly over the next few months.

Also remember that if you are syndicating your RSS feed that you should including relevant links back to your site so that should anyone host them, you get a free back link!

That not enough? You may also want to get your RSS feeds into this list of the Top 55 RSS directories from Robin Good, it’s an older post but still really useful.

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In line with keeping your site out of that thin affiliate category here’s a post looking at avoiding being seen as a spammy site, good advice but the author didn’t really follow it himself *grin*

There is also this much more official, but much longer post from SelfSEO about avoiding the Google spam filter, it refers to the leaked Google document which around last year as well as standard spam practices which you should avoid.

If you have recently had a big hit from Google I recommend you give these a careful read, make sure you are not crossing any lines and if you are make changes, resubmit and keep on the track this time.

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We also have PubCon happening this very week in the big Ol’ USA. It’s going down in Vegas and as usual has some of the biggest speakers in the industry. Make sure you keep your eyes and ears open for the latest news coming out of PubCon, most big time SEO, SEM and Webmaster blog master will be attending so next week will probably see the blog sphere alive with talk about it.

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The only other thing to mention is that we have new blogger onboard for SEO.

Katie is one of my collegues and has been doing SEO and web development as long as me. She’s a great SEO and has her own style and approach to field so be sure to read both our posts to stay on top of all the latest tips and tricks.

I thought with my first post I would share a helpful site with you. The site is Ranks and is designed to help you get the most from your site and to get you natural rankings in the SERPS. It focuses on keyword density, link validator, screen resolution checker and more. For now I am going to concentrate on these three.

I would recommend that you check all the tools and test your site with them to see what results it shows. There are other sites that offer similar tools but I think that Ranks.nl is a good choice for affiliates.

Keyword density

Type in your web address and the results are displayed on the following page. If your site is larger than 30k then it is too large for Ranks.nl to analyze - really for an affiliate site unless you have endless pages it should be well below 30k, if you are above 30k I would look into why your site is so large. There are a few obvious reasons why this could be which you could easily resolve:-

• Optimize your images, by optimizing your images for the web you can reduce their file size drastically.
• Unnecessary code, some sites have empty tags which can make site heavy avoid empty divs.
• Tables make a site unnecessarily heavy, design your site using CSS and use tables for tabular data.

If your site is below 30k it will show keywords that your site is optimized for including a graph, page rank and file size.

Further down the page it shows information on the density and prominence of your keywords and where these are found on your site. You can use this information to your advantage if you can’t see a keyword you are targeting in the list of results then you can alter your content to include more occurrences.

Going to the other extreme if your site is stuffed full of keywords and your density level is too high it would be having a negative impact on your site.

Keyword density is a debatable subject I think having your density somewhere between 4 and 9 is optimized about right, this is something that you can look into further yourself and test with your own site.

Under the repeats heading you will see Ranks.nl tells you where it has found these occurrences which you could use to your own advantage too i.e. titles and meta data.

Link Validator

This tool can help you find broken links, it is important to keep on top of your site maintenance and making sure you have no broken links and that your redirects if any are working as they should.

Screen Resolution Checker

Knowing that your site displays correctly in common screen resolutions could be the difference between your site converting and not. With this tool you type in your url and click the screen size you want to test in. If your site appears broken you can fix it for each resolution.

There are some other tools available on Ranks.nl but these are the three that I have found useful.  Have a look at the site and see how well your site ranks for your important keywords.

This is part four of the “Q & A”, initially called “MoreNiche history”. I changed it’s name because I got a little carried away with the questions and I realized this text had nothing to do with the history of MoreNiche anymore.

Recession, depression and online casinos getting banned in the US. The business world occasionally gets a little bloodbath. In this week’s “Q & A” we explore how MoreNiche keeps afloat when the recession tide is high, the MoreNiche business model and further investigate the MoreNiche promise.

Most affiliate programs are pretending the economy is flawless and I’m not getting any updates or news. And why should they start worrying about losing their affiliates? They’re selling absolute essentials—like giant flasks, miniature robots and the occasional designer sex toy. Let’s find out what MoreNiche has to say to that.

Mircea: How is MoreNiche coping with the recession?

Andy: There is no doubt that sales are down (about 30% over this time 2 months ago) however this is across all online business, unlike some networks who are standing still or not embracing the extra marketing opportunities which a recession can bring, MoreNiche are making a real effort to try and educate our affiliate on how they can make EXTRA sales during this time not less.

“During a recession we will hopefully start to struggle!” Wow, what the hell are you talking about I hear you scream!!

The more we struggle the more competitors will be going out of business completely, leaving the market wide open for the stronger guys, your PPC bids will become lower and it will be easier to rank and advertise, people will be snapping at your feet to sell you cheap advertising, this can only be good for people who have built up their war chest.

M: Can you be more specific?

A: You will have already noticed the SizeGenetics and Proactol credit crunch landing pages and customer discounts, you will notice more blog/newsletter and forum posts talking about how to marketing during hard times. All of these tips are being deployed by our staff and its important if affiliates want to succeed during this time they update their sites also.

Clare updated the index page to include more exposure to the recession and by split testing has saw 18 more sales from the new page in just over a week, this is over $3,000 extra commission paid!! It’s time to get to work and make sure you do not suffer from negative sales over this period.

However the long it takes to get through the recession, the more solid companies which will be left and the less fly by night companies will be left…

… Alternatively we will continue to innovate and see an increase in sales volumes, which is what we are expecting.

M: Why is the MoreNiche approach to affiliate marketing better than the traditional business model? Do you think the general public gives more credibility to small affiliate sites than to big company sites?

A: The answer to this question is simple; with MoreNiche we can build a brand very quickly, at the time of writing this article we have around 40,000 affiliates in our program.
You could say the same with all affiliate programs, but you would be wrong. The number of affiliates is actually quite irrelevant, the number which is important is the number of people who pick up the campaign and actually run with it.

MoreNiche works very hard to ensure affiliates have all the resources and information they need to dump right into the market, resulting in a higher pickup rate and faster returns.
With such a dedicated and well support affiliate team we can very quickly take a product to market and built a brand, we saw this with Proactol. Within the first months of being introduced we had hundreds of thousands of pages in Google talking about the product, this is not possible with a traditional marketing model.

M: What is your opinion on super affiliates? Have you ever personally met one?

A: Super affiliates are rare to come by, we have been in the affiliate marketing game for over 5 years now and only have one real super affiliate on our books. We are looking to have a great relationship with ALL our affiliates regardless of their sales volume or track history, with this said we have met our super affiliate a number of times just like we have others.

I had lunch with two beginner affiliates last time I was in Bulgaria, it is really interesting to get feedback from all types of affiliates and we really do think this is what makes MoreNiche unique. MoreNiche is a network for anyone, experienced market or total beginner we try and treat everybody the same and ensure you have the resources and content you need to make money online.

Some of our best affiliates are from “high risk” countries, often most affiliates programs just reject these applications, yes this does often lead to more post-affiliate management and support, however this is why we believe MoreNiche is different.

M: How do you see MoreNiche 1, 2 and 5 years from now? Dare to name some numbers! Affiliates, products, number of staff?

A: MoreNiche is building a network for the future, laying solid foundation now so we can grow quickly and safely over the next 5 years.
We are investing very heavily in our software platform, current clients and new merchant equations. I believe that in year 1 we will see a lot of consolidation internally, adding a number of key products with dedicated account managers and increasing the number of affiliates as we go. I would expect by December 2009 we will have at least 60,000 affiliates in the network.

As we enter 2010 I believe you will see a managed explosion within the network, growing the number of products, staff and affiliates quickly, in a controlled way. We will have solid processors in place, allowing us to continue offering a premium product range, premium affiliate software and premium support, this for a larger number of products and affiliates.

Well with this being said, I have to admit it’s a no brainer that in 5 years MoreNiche will be a household name within the affiliate marketing world. I’m sure MoreNiche will be competing with the big networks (not on number of merchants but money earned through the network). MoreNiche already is and will continue shaping the future of affiliate marketing. Dedicate more of your time to MoreNiche and book yourself a place in the avangarde of the affiliate marketing world of the future!

Welcome to the SEO roundup for this week. We have some great links and stories today inlcuding why your site can be beat a huge corporation, a new opinion on URL rewriting, Some simple steps to successful site architecture and an interesting article about the media and outbound links.

The first story we are going to look at is from the SEOBook blog and looks at ways being a small business is better than being a large business in SEM.

The big company monster stomps around a lot in the world of SEO, their was the infamous BMW episode with Google and almost infitie additional example of large players doing things that would get you and me kicked out of the SERPs faster than Starbucks gave away coffee this week.

Peter discusses some reasons why, in the world of SEM, small business can have the advantage and come out on top, read what he has to say and hopefully you won’t be as scared next time you go up against Tesco and Amazon in the search engines.

Its a good post and pretty well written so be sure not to miss it.

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The second story I want to highlight for you is a little bit older but none the less informative. It’s on an YOUmoz blog and discusses the issue of URL rewriting; Bad for Google, Good for You.

Firstly don’t let the titile mislead you, read the article and absorb what the guy is saying. Put simply this is just a look at the current attitude towards URL rewriting and a simplification of why and what is done in the process. If you already know your stuff on this subject then this one s probabally not for you but if this kind of thing is new to you, or you just want to know more the post and following comments are worth reading.

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The official SEOmoz blog also featured this post on site architecture. Again its a “simple” look at the process, what it means and why its important but I see a lot of affiliates sites with terrible site architecure and since Google pretty much ignores all other on site factors you need to ensure you get this one right.

Scott uses the concept of a real life office filing cabinet to illustrate how to put your site topgether correctly, he fits in redirects, nofollow and subdomains into the metaphor and all the advice on the page is worth taking in.

Next time you want to create a site make sure you keep this stuff in mind, the easier it is for users and Googlebot to naigate your site, the more likely both are to like it.

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Finally a more abstract post discussing the attitudes of the mainstream media towards linking out.

Many major media sites, the NYT in particular have come under fire for never, and I mean never, linking to other peoples sites. Any external references you have to copy and paste yourself and most discussions relating to other websites are minimised.

It means none of us can work with them to raise brand awareness of products and more without cutting through 100 meters of red tape and spending a few thousand dollers.

David Eaves discusses the attitude of a selection of UK based media giants and looks at the way they do or don’t link out from their sites.

In the second half of 2005 MoreNiche started the rebranding process, at the time MoreNiche and the internal products where within an old limited company (Total WebWorks LTD).

Andy and Darren decided Total WebWorks was the not the right brand name to take us forward as a company, they felt better brand recognition would help from a company point of view for example recruitment and from a customer support standpoint.

In the following two years (2005-2007) MoreNiche experienced a massive growth and the affiliates could notice this because of repetead purchases and refund and chargeback rates were down.

Mircea: What was the outcome of this massive growth and how did the internal infrastructure company infrastructure change?

Andy: Due to this success and the growing nature of our company we have since gone through a hive down process which has meant all of our entities are now sitting in their own companies.

MoreNiche for example was a trading name of Lativio LLP but is now fully owned by MoreNiche LTD. This hive down means each part of the business can be run as its own profit centre, this allows us to make better management decisions and also push the business individually.

M: What does Lativio LLP consist of today?

• MoreNiche LTD – Little explanation needed, MoreNiche.com, network software and affiliate base consist of the main assets within this company.
• Permenda LTD – This houses all of our PE products including SizeGenetics, PenisHealth and UltimateStretcher. Clare has recently taken on the challenge of marketing this company and increasing sales.
• Proactol LTD – The company Katie managers, marketing Proactol.com. Watch this space possible new weight loss opportunities coming soon.
• Slimming.com LTD – Currently under development but will become a large asset for the company and the affiliate network.
• Incubationor LTD – This houses all of our development projects, Darren spends a lot of his time here and this also houses LoveCentria.
• Soula LTD – Our web design and new media company, mainly targeting big corporate clients but also develop all of our group’s sites.
• Claritie – Our customer support team, also taking on more clients in order to expand and improve their service, these guys do a really amazing job.
• Sheerion LLP – This Company manages the gaming side of our business, including WassOnline, WassPoker and the casino promotions.

M: While doing some keyword research I found out that words like “Sizegenetics”, “Proactol” and “MoreNiche” get good searches monthly. How do you think these brands got so popular?

A: Brands do take both time and resource to develop, you can speed up the development of a brand by spending more money but ultimately it is a lengthy process, MoreNiche has been around for many years along with SizeGenetics and now Proactol.

By looking at long term goals and setting solid standards we ensure a long term brand awareness, we ensure that the websites convert and are updated regularly, this gives affiliates regular content and continue to push the brand.

MoreNiche likes to offer the highest payouts per product, this does not always mean the highest commissions but as our products convert well your traffic will make more money with MoreNiche than other networks. Ensuring high payouts and a solid history for paying this enables affiliates to market the products successfully.

With over 40,000 affiliates we can very quickly build up the brand of a product online, overnight we can take a new product and get thousands of links in Google, this is just not possible with any other form of advertising.

Sticking to our core values of advertising products that work and great customer service also means we have repeat purchases and good customer feedback which is also important online.

M: How do you think the MoreNiche affiliates can benefit from the popularity of these MoreNiche products?

A: The massive benefit with any product which has a strong brand is that people will like you quite rightly pointed out search for that brand, affiliate promoting products with strong brands have a higher chance of getting customers looking on their sites than products with low search volumes.

As an affiliate it is important that when people get into the buying stage of their research that your site recommends and promotes the product that they have concluded is the best, if you’re promoting something else it could confuse the consumer and set back their buying lifecycle.

It is important that all affiliates and the merchant sites are consistent in their marketing and suggestions, it is critical that people are suggesting Proactol for example as the best product in the marketing from the first moment the consumers start their search.

M: So, should we, as affiliates, just start targetting specific product keywords and still expect sales?

A: This is a very good question; a customer life includes 3 main stages, generic searching (weight loss), more specific searching (weight loss pill) and then brand searching (Proactol).

Due to the funnel effect of this searching the majority of the traffic is within the generic searching, if you manage to get a site listed well for generic keywords you will get a much higher level of traffic than you would for product only keywords. Targeting generic keywords is very competitive and difficult to rank for, most of the large authority sites are ranked well for these golden keywords.

Most affiliates will find most success targeting more specific keywords (longer tail keywords) for example ‘weight loss pills’ or ‘buy weight loss pills’, the volume for these keywords is less, however much higher than the product specific keywords.

I would not suggest people just target product only keywords as you miss out of the majority of the traffic, I also suggest people do all of the above to get the best results.

M: This year (2008) we’ve seen a lot of change in MoreNiche. The interface, tracking and design have all changed. What are your plans for the near future regarding this?

A: We have a very large list of new features to develop in the near future, a few examples are: Affiliate Rank Improvements (a more fun way of seeing how many more sales you need to “level up”), better connectivity between the forum & affiliates area (Only login once and access both), improved lead tracking, improved reporting and improving our hosted banner solution.

In regards to new merchants we have seen Aloeride come on board, a great addition to the current product range, and we can see an authority brand shaping. The ‘Aloe Vera’ market is a small niche online but the product is by far the best.

Moving forward it is our job to add merchants in an educated way; vetting merchants and doing solid market research is essential before accepting a merchant. I have recently done in-depth research on a potential new niche which looks very exciting for the program, watch this space!

We will continue to develop the weight loss niche and I am looking to add more weight loss products in the next quarter, each new product/niche that is adding will have a dedicated account manager either employed via MoreNiche or the product company, spending 100% of their time working for the network in marketing the product/niche.

There you have it! That’s the MoreNiche promise. All these reasons and tools available for you to just start promoting and keep going. Stay tuned for part IV which will be idealistic and down to Earth, at the same time.

And I have no idea how many parts the MoreNiche history will have; truth is, I like torturing Andy with questions! *evil laugh*

Got questions about MoreNiche yourself? Post below!

welcome to the first week of the SEO Roundup. This is the first entry in a weekly look at whats been happening SEO wise across the net. The feature will look at the top SEO bloggers stories, official news from Google, MSN and Yahoo and the latest tip, trick and techniques to get you in the higher position of search engines.

SEO Roundup will also be a place for you, the affiliates, to become involved. We want your opinions on the news, questions for our SEO team or even stories that you think should be covered in our next post. Comments are always a good way to be noticed but you can always get in touch with us by email using seoteam[at]moreniche.com.

On with this weeks roundup!

One of the hottest debates in this SEO field this week has been caused by SEOBook’s Aaron Wall criticising SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin over attacking a competitor in a way to diminish Google themselves. It’s not the first time Fishkin has used the tactic and it’s clear that more and more people are getting annoyed with it.

Essentially the problem is that Fishkin is using a higher status as an online marketer, one particularly involved with SEO, to selectively police SERPs. He puts both Google and Webmasters in a difficult position which often ends up with the smaller webmaster losing.

I want to make it clear that I agree with Fishkin’s post that the company are certainly not 100% brilliant white hat but there are much, much bigger cheaters out there to be concerned about.

Persoanlly we are with Aaron on this one, whining to Google just because you can is an unfair SEO tactic and with the way Google can be so zealot over certain search terms (such as SEO) it can be very easily manipulated, especially when you call on the SEO community to help.

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Michael Gray did an interesting post discussing PageRank sculpting, worth checking out if you have time.
If you didn’t already know PR sculpting is strategically implementing nofollow tags through navigation and internal linking to keep PageRank focused on certain pages. While not considered a “black hat” practice it is still generally seen as negative.

Gray states that in his opinion it can have a huge positive effect, but only on certain styles of site. I am personally with him on this one, it can be useful for certain types of sites but basic review sites like many affiliates use are often only a few pages large anyway.

If you site is huge with lots of different features controlling PageRank is worth the effort, if you have a five page affiliate review site it’s best to steer clear.

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Not much from the official Google camp this week, a useful post about sites containing malware should you be unlucky/silly enough to end up with this problem.

That’s all for this week, good luck with your SEO!

After finding out how it all got started, it’s time to dig a little deeper to see how MoreNiche came to be what it is today.

In April 2006 MensNiche became MoreNiche as it started to branch out into non-men’s related products. MensNiche had a strong reputation in the adult marketing world but MoreNiche was destined to become… well, more! A brand which could also market in the mainstream arena.

It was time for high commissions and flawless support to become more than affiliate program features, they were becoming company values.

Mircea: MensNiche branched into MoreNiche and WorldNiche. Why did this fork happen?

Andy: Darren and I have been working together all our lives but over the past 5 years we have both been pushing the same company forward. Darren is now focusing on his passion which is product development he is also pushing other areas of the business from accounting through project management to customer support, leaving me to fully concentrate on running MoreNiche.

In 2006 myself and Darren decided that the future of MoreNiche was moving mainstream, we learnt a lot from the adult market and back in 2001 this was one of the most profitable online, we felt if we were to protect the future of our affiliates and ensure the expandable future we see for MoreNiche something had to give.

M: What was going on “behind the curtain” when WorldNiche was born? Is WorldNiche managed by MoreNiche or is it a separate entity?

A: We masterminded a deal with the joint market leader (at the time both MN & LEC controlled pretty much controlled the whole PE market), the owner of LEC, a multi-million dollar deal was agrred over the space of 3 months, meetings were held in both the UK and Canada and in November 2006 the agreement was signed.

WorldNiche opened its doors on 8th November 2006 (incidentally this is my birthday, a very nice present I must say). Our affiliate linking codes where automatically updated so absolutely ZERO affiliate commissions were lost with the switch. This deal was kept relatively quiet; we did not want to create concern for affiliates which was not needed.

The owners of LEC have become close business friends and now run LEC, WorldNiche and a number of other affiliate related businesses. This fork allowed MoreNiche to concentrate on what was important for us at the time, building a long term asset which will service affiliates for years to come.

M: What were your principles and aims back then and how have they changed now?

A: We have a lot of the same values today that we created in 2001, we offer high commissions products which convert well, fantastic affiliate support and a program that pays on time, every time. One concern when working with a smaller network, “will I get paid?”

By ensuring our payouts work like clockwork, it takes one less issue away from the affiliate allowing them to concentrate on what matters, generating traffic and sales.

Although we have the same values as a network today MoreNiche are a much more professional company, we have nicer offices, solidified processors, a strong team and years of experience to fall back on, we have grown well but our core values will never change and are the same as in 2001.

M: So, if you decided go to mainstream why did you keep products like SizeGenetics and PenisHealth?

A: This is a good question, we knew that it would be very difficult to convince the mainstream world that a “male enhancement pill” would work, and we felt that this could have a detrimental effect on the business relationships we could build moving forward.

Currently we do have clinically proven PE methods like the device within the program; they do have the medical backing which proves they work. The reason they are still in the program is for this reason only.

If in the future these products do influence mainstream decision making, it is possible that we change this in some way, however only time will tell. One thing is for sure we would not want to completely remove these products from the network.

M: Tell us a bit about the MoreNiche head quarters.

A: We have office space in Nottingham (UK) and Sofia (Bulgaria) with Sandis working remotely from Riga (Latvia). Myself and Paul are the only people who work full time for MoreNiche from the UK office, I am responsible for overseeing the full day to day operation of the company, my main focus is to ensure both myself and the team are meeting pre-set targets, resulting in the network is progressing well.

MoreNiche has a relatively low number of staff on its payroll, this helps keep costs low and allows for better development of software, affiliates bonuses and investment within the network.

M: Where were you previously operating from and when did you move at your current whereabouts?

A: It’s hard to believe but MoreNiche have only ever had 2 offices (well 3 if you count working from home). In 2003 we moved into a small office “lean valley house”, it could comfortably fit 4 people which was convenient as this is all we had at the time.

The office was very old and not the most enjoyable working environment, as we grew, we knocked down walls, joining other offices within the building to make it larger and accommodate more people. In 2006 we had 9 people in our small office and it was time to move. We purchased a brand new office within a new business park about 2 miles away from our old office.

Two years later, we are in our new office and it’s still standing up to the growth we have sustained, we are pretty much up to capacity with over 30 people operating from our offices.

Looking forward it will not be long before we need to purchase additional office space, this will either be a much bigger office to ensure we are fixed for the next 5 years or we may choose to split up some of our business entities, time will tell.

M: Who can we find at the MoreNiche HQ?

A: Paul is currently our only full time Brand Portfolio Manager employed by MoreNiche; he is currently managing the Property Mentor project which takes up all of his time, Paul is very experienced with affiliate marketing and MoreNiche working on nearly every product in the program at one time or another.

Darren still has a big part to play in MoreNiche, working behind the scenes we work very closely together ensuring the network is progressing well, we are very passionate people and even at 1am in the morning after a few bottles of wine will we be putting the world to right. It’s a fantastic feeling to have someone you can talk to with a similar level of experience and beliefs.

M: Who are the brand portfolio managers?

A: Katie (Proactol), Clare (Permenda), Dave/Xan (Wass) and many more. Often a company want to be a part of our affiliate network but do not have the resource to allocate a dedicated person to MoreNiche; this person could be hired by MoreNiche like Paul or the merchant themselves.

If we are really excited by the product/niche or they form part of our group, we may make exceptions, Katie marketing Proactol through MoreNiche has done an outstanding job, Katie is passionate, organised and see’s the job through. It is some of Katies one-on-one affiliates who can be found in our top1 today. We are really looking to see these products grow and with dedicated brand portfolio managers we have some exciting propositions.

M: What about Sandis? He gets praised a lot on the forums and all the newbies seem to be most familiar with him.

A: Sandis Viksna is our Affiliate Development Director working remotely from Riga; Sandis has a wealth of experience and was actually one of MoreNiche’s top affiliate before being offered a full time job. Sandis’s job is to develop the affiliate base, supporting affiliates and helping generate more sales, all of the affiliate’s e-books and the newbie guide is thanks to Sandis.

M: And finally, what is the MoreNiche development team doing in Bulgaria?

A: The main reason is when we purchased the source code to our very old affiliate software (yes in MensNiche days we used to rent it, and then purchased the code out right) was written by Bulgarian developers.

Once we had the source code we then hired a team of developers (about 3 years ago) to work on the code, as the old code was commented in Bulgarian and we took one of the software vendors developers it made sense to have developers in Bulgaria.

At the time it was also very cost effective. The team is very different today but we still have one of the oldest developers in our team, we have 1 x Manager/Lead Developer with 8+ years experience, 3 x Programmers, 1 x Project Manager, 1 x QA and a secretary all working hard to help the company and software run smoothly and add new features.

I am very happy to report the team are fantastic and over the last 6 months we have made fantastic progress, this is thanks to all the hard work of the team.

And we, as affiliates, we see deadlines and goals being set and met. MoreNiche is a nice example of great management. Tune in to the blog, next week, for the third part of the MoreNiche history. Andy will further describe the MoreNiche online infrastructure and outline the future of the MoreNiche brand. Until then, keep selling confidently as you can always be sure you’ll get your check on time!

I was reading around the forum and found a thread in which Andy was having a very introspective moment and asking himself “Why am I a muppet?”. Then he went on to explain how he lost a flight to Bulgaria, where he was supposed to catch up with the MoreNiche development team, because he forget his passport at home.

Hold it, just a minute there! Who’s Andy? What’s he doing at MoreNiche? And what’s the MoreNiche development team doing in Bulgaria?

I have no friggin’ idea myself! Ok, ok, I do. But I didn’t a few days ago. Luckily for me (and you), Andy was kind enough to answer those questions. And a bunch more I threw at him.

Read on to find out how MoreNiche survived the ice age!

Mircea: Hello, Andy. Thank you for accepting to take this interview. Everybody loves a good story. Let’s get started! Tell me a bit about yourself and your background.

Andy: Thank you, too, for the opportunity to present some insights into the company behind the screen, the people, the future and our values.

I was born in November 1982 into a working class family in the midlands (UK), my childhood was pretty standard for that era, I loved playing football (soccer), computer games and hanging out with friends. We did not have a lot of money but my parents did a great job of hiding this from us (myself and my younger brother).

My father has always been involved in computers in one way or another, he started repairing computers (if you can call a spectrum that) in the early 80’s, dabbled in a little game development and now is a network engineer for the university of Nottingham.

We always had computers in one form or another while growing up, I remember the first time we had the internet when it was first publicly available, it was very limited back then, we could check our mail, become a member of discussion groups and maybe check the weather.

Nowadays it’s all mobile technology; I use a powerful HP business laptop and a dual Sim mobile phone which allows me to take personal and business calls from one handset.

M: How did you meet Darren?

A: Myself and Darren have been best friend for over 20 years, we grew up together. Before either of us were even aware of the internet we would sit up all night drawing comic books and selling them around the neighborhood, it is fair to say we always wanted to be selling something to someone.

At the age of 7 we had the same “work hard, play hard” attitude we have today, we would often stay up all night playing football manager games or trying to destroy one another at settlers, when championship manager was invented I don’t think our parents saw us for months.

M: So, how did you two get started on the affiliate marketing path?

A: Darren Beale (founder of MensNiche.com) started making money from affiliate marketing before me, the tradition is he was working at KFC working long hours for very little pay (he was only 16 at the time). It was getting close to Christmas and he needed to find extra money to buy his girlfriend the perfect present.

Darren started researching ways to make extra money online and came across eBay marketing and banner impressions, back then people would pay you every time somebody clicked on your banner. All Darren had to do was get people to his websites.

Trying lots of different things, some worked and some did not, he over time Darren managed to get hundreds of thousands of visitors to click on his banners and this is what started his online marketing career. Not only did that shape his future but his first check for over $1000 arrived in time for Christmas.

M: I’m figuring Darren’s success pushed your buttons, too.

A: Ofcourse! After seeing the success Darren had made through online marketing it did not take me long to realise there is money to be made here, I made a number of different websites but the first one that made me real money was PenisEnlargementDirector.com.

PenisEnlargementDirector.com was a directory site of male enhancement products, this site quickly earned me over $2,000 every pay period through other affiliate programs and then later MensNiche. I sold this in September 2003 for $13,000 while I was at University; I think this is when I first got the online marketing buzz.

M: Why did you choose male enhancement?

A: When looking for an product to market there are two key factors to take into account: (a) are there people looking for that product/service? (b) how saturated is the market?
These are the same two key questions we need answering before entering any new marketplace today, over 6 years ago when we started in the male enhancement niche it was very underdeveloped.

There were no pills sites and the main solution was the online exercise program, these where very poor and often had very little information to keep members interested. It is safe to say this was a perfect market to attack, it had many people looking for solutions and no clear product/service.

M: How has market changed in the last years?

A: As with many niches, when there is demand, competition comes, in the early days many new products and affiliate programs popped up. The stronger products and companies rose to the top and started to dominate the market place.

Smaller programs and products dropped off, over the last two years I believe the market has been pretty stagnant, we have some clear market leaders but nobody snapping at their heals to force them to improve and innovate.

Today it is a harder market to enter, however sales can still be made, with the internet changing daily, new technology being born, unless the top boys continue to innovate they will lose marketing share to tomorrows super affiliates.

M: Basically, MensNiche was a natural step forward in your experience, right?

A: Right. Darren went on to promote many other affiliate programs and started to earn some serious income, the one thing he noticed and something we still notice is the serious lack of support affiliate programs give newbie’s. They throw you into a reporting system which very basic stats and 10 banners, then expect you to make sales.

Darren Beale registered the domain (mensniche.com) on 23rd February 2001 and the program was opened to the public on 25th may 2002, the vision was clear and still forms a big part of our vision today, offer high commissions on products which convert and the best possible support we can.

M: The affiliate marketing world was surely different back then. Were you “looking up” to any other affiliate program when you started MensNiche?

A: This is a very good question, the main reason Darren started MensNiche initially was due to the poor programs that were available, keep in mind affiliate programs like AffiliateWindow (2000) Commission Junction (2000) and TradeDoubler (1999) were still very young, it is safe to say the market was very new.

We looked at the competition and made sure we where better, this is something we still do and are always ensuring we offer one of the best affiliate programs around. I have still not found another affiliate program that offers the same level of support to affiliate which we do; we really do care about the affiliates needs and do everything possible to cater for them.

Stay tuned for PART TWO to find out how MensNiche became MoreNiche, where and why MoreNiche operates and why is the development team in Bulgaria!

The SEO Book blog featured an interesting post today regarding URL canonicalization a more advanced SEO problem that can secretly be effecting your SERPs.

We have briefly looked at preventing this before inside the htaccess guide but Peter’s posts targets the subject directly and is well worth a read for any webmaster who is interested in SEO.

I thought I would include a few recommended sites for you to check out as part of your link building campaigns. Both sites are geared towards managing your online presence of both your site and you as an affiliate marketer.Both can give you some decent links and take only a few minutes to set up.

Lookup Page is a kind of online CV/social networking site that has a  free or paid option where you can list you sites with good anchor text. The site looks good and is easy to use so get on there today.

AboutUs.org is a wiki database of all websites and their owners. It gives you chance to link to your website and include information such as keywords and content.