This is a guest post written by Jack Harold of Affiliate Home Business.

Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the way to go in 2011? Some people find it a waste of time. The general feeling is that it is either too much work or the results take too long to materialize. Is it really worth the time and effort? Well, look at this. Your efforts take a month to show up but your website is able to stay at the top position of the SERPs for the next few months. Is it worth it? You bet!

Google has been doing a lot to improve the search quality. If you have read my article on “Google: Are You Really Serious About Tackling Webspam? I Doubt It!” over at John Chow’s blog, I try to be sore to deny that fact but it is true. Google has been making changes to its search engine almost every single day that hardly anyone will notice it. To keep up with Google’s pace, you certainly need to know what not to do and what has to be done to keep your website ranking high up on the SERPs.

Today, I will just like to emphasize on 4 pointers that you can take away from this article here. 4 top SEO mistakes that you should avoid in 2011.

Anyone telling you that Affiliate Marketing is easy is not giving the full truth! It becomes simple enough once you get the hang of it and once you master it – then it becomes easier, but I don’t think its easy. You are still required to do the work to earn via Affiliate marketing.

What even more makes the waters murky are some vendors that use strategies I consider to be questionable. And while as a product owner myself I can understand multiple concerns we have to deal with – I believe that EVERY affiliate who helped you make a sale, deserves to get paid!

If you helped me sell my product – you are getting paid because without you this sale NEVER happened!

But I also know that not every vendor subscribes to this position and I had to deal with the problem I’m about to describe. Better yet – I will explain HOW you can avoid it all together!

Affiliate Marketing can be a reason for legal action against you, whether you agree with new FTC “guide” or not, it is here to stay. In this post I simply want to share a resource that gives you an option to add Affiliate Disclosure to your email marketing campaigns.

I just got it myself from Mike Young and will be working on integrating it into my email marketing.

Simply click here to download *.zip archive that has the PDF with exact legal language you can use in your Affiliate Emails as Disclaimer.

I love it when I can re-purpose a plugin designed for one thing and benefit with it in multiple ways! And as such I want to share with you a WordPress SEO plugin – SEO Smart Links and how to use it for effective affiliate marketing.

I’m a long time supporter of aLinks plugin and still include it as part of the Expert WordPress installer that you can download for free. Unfortunately owner of the plugin Sean stopped supporting it and I see a time when it will stop working due to some changed that I’m sure will be introduced sooner or later in WordPress core.

What is even more – you can’t download aLinks anymore and as such – I want to offer an alternative WordPress SEO plugin that can also be used for Affiliate Marketing!

Affiliate marketing is one of the most “passive” forms of online income there is.

• No products to create.
• No customers to deal with.
• No shipping or refunds or anything.

Easy peasy. Well, once you get started it is. The hard part has been HOW to get started.

1. Buy a web design program for $300?
2. Hire someone to create a website?
3. Set up something free that you have no control over and could be taken away any time?

NOTE: Following content is guest post by one of my all time favorite Internet Marketing mentors Jimmy D. Brown of  “Affiliatenaire“.

If you look at the average site for any given affiliate, you’ll likely find a boring, tasteless smorgasbord of prefab content that was created more for search engines to read than it was for real people to read.

While that make aid in rankings, is it really going to do any good once someone sees the site listed and makes a visit?

Probably not.

What every affiliate needs to learn is simple -

** CONTENT IS KING ***

It’s content that leads to sales, not a strategically designed website that search engines temporarily find meets their ranking criteria.

So, let’s talk about that.