Affiliates: What Has Google Ever Done For Us?

The affiliates' view of Google just reminds me of the Monty Python - Life of Brian sketch: "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

Watch it here:



Every week now there's a thread on the A4UForum complaining that Google has kicked them out of the SERPS or they've changed AdWords to increase minimum bids or remove duplicate display URLS or some other supposed action solely designed to harm affiliates.

I take the contrary view. I believe Google has done massive amounts to help us affiliates.

So what has Google ever done for us affiliates?

I just look at my affiliate business about 4 years ago. I could get away with murder, creating massive MFA sites. But the reason I did this was that I was basically forced to do it. I had no tools to streamline the creation of sites or the collection of useful information. I only had Webmerge which allowed me create tens of thousands of pages a day. I just couldn't be bothered using Dreamweaver to create useful sites - it was boring!

I had the stick from Google before they gave me the carrot. They all-but kicked my main revenue earning site out of the index and started to make Adwords less profitable for affiliates.

But then came the Google carrots and what forms the basis of my view that Google has done an awful lot for affiliates:

1) Blogger
I can design sites, some may disagree, but I can do it. The thing is I don't enjoy it. I don't like spending a day working on a template, setting up the internal linking, making sure content fits and faffing around with the affiliate links - it bores me to tears.

When Blogger came about it was like a breath of fresh air. I didn't notice many other UK affiliates using blogging as a "route to market" back in late 2005 but I saw the opportunities to streamline my business and product useful content in a manner that Internet users would find easy to digest.

I can now create new sites in less than an hour. This leaves me more time to focus on the content - which I'm sure Google wants.

Whilst other use Wordpress, I stick to Blogger because its damn simple to use and doesn't allow me to waste time faffing with widgets, wodgets and gadgets - I focus on whats important - content!

2) Google News Alerts
Google News Alerts for a fair while the main source of information for writing my blog posts. I'd put the keywords in and every day I'd be emailed the relevant news and gossip. I'd then blog about it. It's also a good way to way to monitor your own "brand". I now have to spend less time searching for content, It now comes to me. Google has saved me even more time.

3) Google Reader
Google Reader is another fantastic tool to keep up with your favourite industries. This has also streamlined the affiliate industry and kept up more-up-to-date.

4) Google Analytics
I can't do without my Google Analytics, you can cut and dice, explore keywords variations, understand your traffic much easier than other tools - I just love it. It's certainly helped my affiliate business.

The top four I know are also offered elsewhere, but no one else does it the Google way!

5) Feedburner
I know Feedburner was bought by Google, but it's a fantastic Google tool. If you use it for your blog's RSS tool then you can get content into Google in minutes.


6) Google Webmaster Tools
This is another fantastic Google Tool. You can obviously check how many pages Google is crawling, spot errors in your site, know when they're pissed off with you, set the geographic location of your sites. Any affiliate that doesn't use this tool, is either a direct to merchant PPC guy or stupid (nb. they're not mutually exclusive ;-) )

7) Google Website Optimizer
I haven't had the time to use the Google Website Optimiser yet, but it looks fantastic - just check out the testimonials and case studies.

8) Matt Cutts
Matt gives the community in general a heads up about stuff they shouldn't be doing and often gives examples of sites that have crossed the line. Every affiiate that thinks they're on the edge of acceptability should check in here regularly.

9) Google Blogs
You can't say that Google doesn't communicate with it's users. You're always aware of new products they're releasing. You can keep up to date with changes to all their tools with the Google
blogs.

10) Blog Search
I don't think Google's blog search is as good as Technorati, but it's another tool in an affiliates armoury and does help affiliates get their message out and find new content.

11) Google Trends
This really helps me spot the cyclical nature of certain products and events. It also allows me to compare sites I've worked on. I mostly work in stuff launching in the future so could they now work on a tool to do that please?

12 Related Searches
Many searches will result in a list of eight other related keyphrases. It doesn't take a genious to work out how this can help!

Overall, Google has massively helped my affiliate business. And if you really think about it, I'm sure it's helped yours too! It's those that spend most of their time moaning about Google are the one's that haven't done their research and are in touch with their thinking so can't predict how they will try and clean up their offering and make it appealing for their audience. Just because you create a site, it doesn't mean that everyone is going to love it and it deserves a place in their index. It doesn't work that way!

So what has Google ever done for affiliates? Answer: Shit loads!