You know back in January there were rumors afoot that Matt Cutts was inimating that he might be ready to try something different. Something other than being the poster boy of Google and the search engine optimization (SEO) community.

I was this quote from Matt's blog that raised the eyebrows…

"I love working at Google, but at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say 'Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. It’s been like eight years now! When do we move on to our next adventure?'"

But it's a month later and I haven't heard any more on this topic, and that's a good thing. Matt Cutts is all about ethical SEO methods, and he tries to make sure that search engine spammers aren't the ones getting the good results in Google. Although Matt and the BlackHat community hold a mutual respect for each other I think … at least, it seems that way to me.

Matt works for the quality group of Google, specializing in SEO issues. He is one of the co-inventors listed upon one of the most well-known patent filings from Google: "Information retrieval based on historical data". He wrote SafeSearch, Google's family filter. He was the first to publicly propose to use historical web site information to identify link spam.

Matt Cutt's blog is the semi-offical source for upcoming Google ranking updates. So, many of us are glad Matt's around to answer questions and give guidance. It's nice to have a guy who knows what he's talking about at the keyboard.

Joining solid affiliate programs is a good start. But the affiliate program is usually only going to give you banner ads and text ads … most don't provide the content part.

Here's my advice, do a search on "free rewrite articles." Pick an article repository, go there, search on your keywords … not sure what they are for you, but an example would be "music" … be as specific in the keywords as you can. Music might be too general.

Grab yourself some articles. You must publish articles with the author's signature at the bottom. Give credit for the content where credit is due.

Now, keep yourself out of trouble with Google. You have to write some content too. You need to have about 20-40% of the content on the page be unique. On every page!

So, if I were you I'd write a few paragraphs about the article's topic, maybe getting a little focused on the keywords you're going for on that page. Definately use your keywords as the anchor text for the affiliate program's links.

Meaning, if you're talking about electric guitars on a page and have an article on electric guitars, then in the part you write, link the words "electric guitars" to the affiliate program's link to their electric guitars. See?

You can't touch the content of the author's article. It's a matter of honor on that reguard. It's your way of valuing that author giving you free content.

Basically, you're writing an intro to the article and you need to make a clear distinction between what you're writing and what the other guy wrote. This should resolve your content issues for now.

It's a lot of work, but that's how it's done. Dig in!

Currently, I don't offer any one-on-one tutoring at Affiliate Guild … yet! If you guys think that's something I should do sooner rather than later, then let me know. I would have to charge a fee, but I also could keep it reasonable. Affiliate Guild has a complete school already in place, so it's not that hard to do.

You might have read my posts about the Affiliate Marketers Bootcamp. Taking this course is really helping me to be more aware of what the newer affiliate's needs are. It's all information I already know, but it's always good to hear it again. I'll be blogging and posting about things I think could benefit others. Maybe some of that will help you as well?!

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Article Marketing for Affiliates

This video from DiamondSEO does a nice job of summing up the two methods of article marketing by affiliate marketing affiliates. Can you see the difference in where to publish your articles and why?