One of the foremost tenets of affiliate marketing is know your partners. Monitoring merchants is something every affiliate should do, but how many really do it?

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) enables you to subscribe for updates on any company name or keyword with Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are e-mail updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

In addition to providing you with news updates for any keyword term you select, you can also get e-mails if your keyword is mentioned in a blog, the regular Google results, or Google Groups.

This is a great, free tool to keep an eye on any key announcements for companies you promote, as well as positive and negative opinions on the companies in blogs and Google Groups.

Visit http://www.google.com/alerts for more details.

GoogSpy, one of my favorite tools, has been rebranded with lots of enhancements. The free, Web-based tool for competitor research is now SpyFu.

Velocityscape launched GoogSpy.com in April 2005 to enable people to sleuth out the keywords their competitors were buying on Google AdWords.

That functionality is very useful for me, as an affiliate manager, to monitor trademarks and discover the keywords affiliates are bidding on.

It is also great for affiliates to see what their competitors are bidding on. Huge time saver for gathering competitive intelligence.

The name has changed to SpyFu partly because it’s become more than a Google AdWords competitive intelligence tool. They have plans for the near future to expand it to cover other search engines.

GoogSpy was free for all, but there are features of SpyFu that will only be available to subscribers. The good news is that the free data on SpyFu is more robust than what used to be available on GoogSpy.

Here are the features of SpyFu:

• Search by Domain (No Cost)
• Browse by Category and Industries (No Cost)
• Search by Domain (i.e. Microsoft.com) and view
  • Estimated Daily Advertising Budget (No Cost)
  • Total Clicks Per Day (No Cost)
  • Average Cost per Click (No Cost)
  • Average Click Day (No Cost)
  • Average Ad Position (No Cost)
  • Average Ad Competitors (No Cost)
  • Average Ad Percentile (No Cost)
  • Alexa Rank (No Cost)
  • Incoming Links (No Cost)
  • Average Load Time (No Cost)
  • Top 10 Organic Results (No Cost)
    • All Organic Results up to 50th position w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
  • Top 10 Ads (No Cost)
    • All Advertisements up to 50th position w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
  • Top 20 Organic Competitors (No Cost)
    • All Organic Competitors w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
  • Top 20 Ad Competitors (No Cost)
    • All Ad Competitors w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
  • Up to 15 Sub Domains for the parent domain (No Cost)
    • Listing of all Sub Domains (Subscription Only)
  • Up to 15 Other Domains Owned (No Cost)
  • Up to 5 of the Categories the Domain is listed in (No Cost)
    • Listing of all Categories the Domain is listed in (Subscription Only)
• Search by Term (i.e. Cars) and view
  • Cost per Click (No Cost)
  • Click per Day (No Cost)
  • Cost per Day (No Cost)
  • Number of Advertisers (No Cost)
  • Number of Organic Search Results (No Cost)
  • Top 5 AdWords results (advertiser) by Domain with Ad (No Cost)
    • Top 50 AdWords results (advertiser by Domain) with Ad (No Cost)
  • Top 10 Organic Search Results with description (No Cost)
    • Top 50 Organic Search results by Domain (No Cost)
  • Up to15 Terms Competitors also bought (No Cost)
    • Complete list of AdWords Competitors also bought w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
  • Up to 15 Terms related to the searched Term (No Cost)
    • Complete list of Related Terms w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
  • Up to 15 Terms contextually related to the searched Term (No Cost)
    • Complete list Terms contextually related to the searched Term w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
  • Up to 5 Categories the Term is listed in
    • Listing of all Categories the term appears in (Subscription Only)

SpyFu is powered by Web Scraper Plus+ to gather data from sources around the web and to monitor specific data points. This information comes from search engines, Alexa data, DMOZ categories, and variety of other sources. They are using their data manipulation and cleansing skills to parse and structure the data. Then they are using Bayesian logic to sort, compare, and compile statistics and data.

According to Michael J. Roberts, President of Velocityscape (and Proprietor of SpyFu), “SpyFu.com has nearly 20 times more data than GoogSpy, and the coolest statistics imaginable. This time we believe did it right.”

It is often said there are no new ideas in Internet marketing. That may or may not be true, but as far as I am concerned, it doesn’t matter.

I frequently refer to my tattered copy of “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” and one of my favorite passages is The Law of the Mind, where authors Al Ries and Jack Trout explain that it’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.

The example used in this, the third of the 22 laws, is the MITS Altair 8800 – the world’s first personal computer.

After the MITS Altair 8800, there were four other personal computers that came out shortly after: Apple II, Commodore Pet, IMSAI 8080, and Radio Shack TRS-80.

Apple stood out and still remains a powerhouse. MITS isn’t part of the conversation anymore.

As far as a more current example, there is the 1000-Word Page. The concept was that people could “adopt” one of 1,000 common words they featured on the site and point it to a URL. Early on, there was positive buzz and we all know what that leads to… competition.

Shortly after the 1000-Word Page launched, Internet marketing whiz Joel Comm rolled out a competitor called 500 Words.

Joel used his marketing acumen to launch an improved product with more effective marketing. Shortly after, Joel had sold out each of his 500 words. As I type this, the 100-Word page still has more than 95% of their inventory available.

And Joel took it a step further by selling a version of his 500 Words software for other Internet marketers to purchase, so they can try their hand at replicating the concept and making some cash from it.

The software for creating these sorts of sites is called the Link Sizzler.

One of the best ways to drive lots of traffic to your site is through media exposure – the sort of traffic that money cannot buy.

In order to get that sort of media exposure, the media needs to find you first.

The first step is to establish yourself as an expert in an area that interests you, and where you have a background. Then you’ve got to set about branding yourself as the expert in your subject of choice.

There is a publication called the Yearbook of Experts, where I recently signed up for a membership.

This membership includes being in the printed Yearbook of Experts, an ExpertClick.com profile, free listings of your events and news conferences in Daybook.com, and the printed/CD-ROM versions of the Power Media BlueBook.

Best of all – you get to send up to 52 press releases through this service, which are listed at NewsReleaseWire and syndicated to Google News and Lexis/Nexis.

If you currently send our press releases, you probably know that it’s an extra expense to have embedded links and images – you can do both when you’re part of the Yearbook of Experts.

In addition to the value of inserting links into your press releases, when you include an image, it can be picked up by Google News and included in your listing there (hint – make sure it’s a JPG and the dimensions are symmetrical).

It’s time to make your business a business. If you’ve been using your social security number when you join affiliate programs and conduct other business, you may want to rethink things.

As your business grows, there are a number of reasons why you might want to incorporate.

Reasons to incorporate your business include people taking you seriously. When you add “Inc.” to your company name, it makes your business appear bigger and more established than somebody working solo in their home office.

Also, there can be tax benefits when you incorporate a business, as well as some liability protection. Check in with your lawyer and accountant (they are also key for a growing business to be sure you are doing things correctly).

If you are aiming to convey that your business is a real workplace, you’ll want to get a business phone line. Do you want potential business partners hearing the cute outgoing message on your regular home phone?

There’s a really neat alternative to getting a business line from your local phone carrier. It’s a company called ConnectMeVoice.

ConnectMeVoice is a great service for affiliates, as it includes all sorts of features to help establish that you’ve got a real company. This service works with your existing phone line.

Packages start at $9.95 a month and enable you to get:

• 800 number
• Automated attendant (“Hello, Thank you for calling Your Company Name. If you are looking for Merchant Relationships, dial 1; Ellen Smith, dial 2; hear about our deal of the week, dial 3; and to receive a fax outlining our placement fees, dial 4.”)
• Up to 25 extensions
• Voicemail
• Fax to e-mail
• Vanity numbers
• Web interface – view messages and faxes online

Another step to consider to enhance your image as a real business is to have your domains registered and you business mail directed to a P.O. Box or a mailbox at the UPS Store.

Not only does this give a more professional impression, but it enables you to maintain privacy by not sharing your home address so openly.

So you missed the big land grab of the 90’s when all of the good .com address were snapped up? Don’t fret – there’s a new frontier, and you (may) still have time to get some great names.

The place to claim your name, your brand, your site, etc. is MySpace. The way your name is represented on MySpace is like so: www.myspace.com/yourname

Why MySpace? Well, that’s where the masses are going. According to Alexa, MySpace is one of the top sites, right behind Google, MSN and Yahoo.

If you check the list at WordTracker for the most frequently searched keywords in the search engines, you’ll see multiple iterations of MySpace in the top 20 searches.

And if you think it’s a passing trend, consider that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp purchased Intermix Media, owner of MySpace, for $580 million in 2005. Don’t expect it to go away any time soon.

Some critics try to minimize MySpace as a hangout for kids where anarchy reigns. There is an interesting White Paper on the dynamics of MySpace at http://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html to provide a more informed view of the social network.

And it’s most definitely a venue for business – witness the many thousands of groups dedicated to Business and Entrepreneurs on MySpace.

So get your company name, your name, your site name, whatever, on MySpace – do it before somebody else squats on it.

Community is a core component to many successful affiliates. Forums and message boards can be effective, but everybody has one. Set your site apart with conference calls.

While hosting conference calls can be expensive, there is a free service called Free Conference Call that will provide a line for up to 96 people to call in.

The conference call functionality is great for live action interaction to bring your site community together. However, there are always some folks that can’t make it to the call for whatever reason.

The Free Conference Call service has a solution for this problem – they also offer free conference recording.

As with their original conference call service, there is no contract, no upsells, no advertisements, and no reservation necessary. The recording service is free and it’s accessible by phone or computer, with no additional charges for downloading.

This is great news for anybody that wants to access the content, but doesn’t want to incur the cost of the call. You can distribute, archive or even send the call to your listeners via podcast.

To access the conference recording features, visit FreeConferenceCall.com and register for an account. You will receive an instant account with recording passwords and playback instructions.

As an affiliate marketer, you code, your content, your copy, etc. is your business. So what are you going to do if your hard drive or machine dies on you?

The solution is to get yourself an external hard drive. Think of it as cheap business insurance.

You’ll also need a backup software program to automate the process. Otherwise, you can copy all of the files manually to your external hard drive.

Not only does this provide you with protection in the event of some technical failure, but it also protects you against the sort of stupid mistakes that happen late at night.

What you do with an external hard drive is to backup your entire hard drive to the external hard drive on a regular basis – daily or so.

Personally, I make a complete duplication of my system each week, and every night I back up any new files. And I have a second external hard drive off site, which gets a complete backup of my laptop ever couple weeks.

If you don’t want to buy two external hard drives, you can also do incremental backups to DVDs.

While you are protecting your data, you should also consider safeguarding your machines by getting a battery backup to block power surges, spikes, and outages that can damage your computer equipment and corrupt important data.

There are lots of options for capacity, price, etc. I have the following in place as my main backup: Maxtor One Touch II 200 GB External Hard Drive, PC Back Up software, Belkin 1100VA Battery Backup.

Don’t wait until you lose everything – protect your affiliate marketing business proactively and sleep well tonight.

One bit of feedback that came out of the last Affiliate Summit was that many people could never find somebody on the staff when they needed them.

Since we were wearing white Polo shirts, we ended up blending in too much with the crowd.

We’d like to fix that this time around by giving the Affiliate Summit attendees the opportunity to dress the staff in a way that they will stand out.

Should the Affiliate Summit staff were pants, shorts, Polo shirts, t-shirts… what?

Go to mydrobe.com/event/170 and tell us how we should dress. Please include details in your comments, like if you’d prefer that we were neon green t-shirts with STAFF in bold letters on the back.

If you are like most people, the error pages on your site are the default pages provided by your host. In the past, I’ve encouraged affiliates to customize these pages, but many affiliates have come back to ask how to get the error traffic to the customer error pages.

Error messages occur due to a number of different conditions taking place on your site. These error conditions generate numbers to refer to the corresponding error condition.

Some of the more common error messages are as follows:

Error in Client

• 400 Bad syntax
• 403 Forbidden
• 404 Not Found (this one is the most common)

Error in Server

• 500 Internal Error

There are a few different ways you can create your error pages.

Create Error Files

Just create error pages and name them as follows:

error400.html
error403.html
error404.html
error500.html

Place these files in the home directory of your domain.

Create a .htaccess File

First, create the HTML page you wish to use as your error page and upload that file to your home directory.

Then create a .htaccess file and add lines that specify which pages should come up in place of the generic error pages. Below are examples error documents to specify that will be called for a given error condition:

ErrorDocument 400 http://www.your_domain.com/400.html
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.your_domain.com/403.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.your_domain.com/404.html
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.your_domain.com/500.html

Just add these lines to your .htaccess file and upload the .htaccess file to your home directory.

Add a Snippet of Code to Your .htaccess File

Plug the following bit of code into your .htaccess file, and then create a custom error file named “error.html” that contains your error message content.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) /error.html

Whichever way you create your custom error pages, be sure to test after you’ve finished setting them up. If you are having problems, contact your host.