Archive for the ‘Marketing Tools’ Category
Internet Marketing Tools - Hot Trend for 2010 & Beyond
Unless you’ve been completely ignoring the affiliate marketing landscape, you’re well aware of the fact that internet marketing tools rule these days. A lot of people who would never consider an ebook will happily pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for marketing tools. But why?
If you’re a working affiliate marketer, the amount of time saved by using good tools can be enormous. If you value your time at $100/hour and a tool saves you 2 hours/week in tedious work, you’re going to value that tool at roughly $800/month. It doesn’t mean that you’d be willing to spend $800, but it does mean that you will have no trouble justifying $50/month.
When it comes to ebooks, the ROI can be much more vague. One good tip COULD, in theory, make you a ton of money. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t even seem to offer much in the way of original information, so the overall transaction can be very disappointing in many cases. When you factor in the time it takes to actually read an ebook, it’s easy to see why some people are cutting back in this area.
Have you personally noticed a difference in your buying habits? Do you get more tools or more ebooks? Let us know in the comments!
CPA Marketing With Wordpress
In case you didn’t already know, Wordpress is a great tool for CPA marketing. Although a lot of us associate it with bloggers who don’ t make a ton of money, it’s also an extremely useful content management tool for those of us who know how to monetize a site. You can create a blog, a portal site, or even a standard landing page. Consider some of the ways you can use Wordpress as an affiliate…
- Make a content-heavy blog. Sometimes, you just need to focus on quality content. It’s great to make simple landing pages or direct linking campaigns, but it’s also smart to have some quality sites that will stand the test of time. Wordpress makes it exceptionally easy to do this.
- Make a flog. This isn’t exactly recommended, especially for US-based affiliates - but it’s a technique that many used for years. People would create a fake blog (flog) and then put in fake entries recommending affiliate products. People misunderstood the motives and bought the products.
- Create a simple landing page. Numerous software packages exist to turn Wordpress blogs into attractive landing pages.
- Use it to add credibility to your landing page. You can still use a regular landing page, but if you add a link to your blog, you can show people that you’re not just an affiliate, but a subject matter expert.
If you’re not familiar with Wordpress yet, you should be. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll have one more extremely powerful tool in your affiliate arsenal.
Diversify Your Career Skills
Since the summer I graduated high school back in the early ’80s, I’ve been working full time at an auto assembly plant, performing quality control. It’s a job that felt secure for more than 20 years, and it allowed me to get married at a young age, buy a house and start a family. As thankful as I am for all these things, I’ve begun to notice the writing on the wall. Many of my friends and co-workers are being laid off.
It became clear that I needed to diversify my skills in order to protect my children’s nest egg. With their college money hanging in the balance, I had extra incentive to start an Internet business in a low-competition industry. When I started out on this endeavor, I certainly wasn’t a professional. In fact, I barely knew anything about internet marketing tools. Fortunately, I got the hang of things quickly and used my natural charisma and enthusiasm to attract business.
Are Paid Affiliate Marketing Tools Worth It?
If you spend more than 5 minutes involved in the online “internet marketing scene, you’ll come across some kind of affiliate marketing tools. Often, they’re extremely expensive tools, such as the $2000 Google Cash Detective Program. It’s natural to wonder if they’re actually worth it, or if it’s all a bunch of hype designed to get wannabes to fork over their hard-earned cash.
Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than just saying, “Yes, they’re all good” or “No, don’t buy products”. There are good ones and there are bad ones. On the bright side, I can say definitively that if a product is over $100 or $200, you absolutely do not need it to be successful. Most of the successful affiliates I know do use some tools, but I’ve never once met a top affiliate who honestly used all the flashy, expensive products. Even the gurus who promote them are often lying about how much they use the tool they’re promoting.
You should also remember that those expensive products treat IM gurus much the same way that luxury brands treat Hollywood celebrities - they give them everything for free. Yes, the guys are making tons of money and they could buy the products on their own. That doesn’t matter. Giving it to them for free gives them a reason to try them out.
I’m not saying that fancy tools can’t make your life easier, because they definitely can. What I’m saying is that I’ve never seen a $2000 product that would turn a $10/day affiliate into a $1000/day affiliate. Tools are better for making your existing high revenue business more efficient. If you’re not making thousands already, don’t dump thousands on a product.
Outside of those expensive products, though, there are tons of products in much more reasonable price ranges. Should you buy those? Well, I won’t say that you shouldn’t. Many of the products you see are great - Twitter Adders, Facebook ad management programs, article spinners, and so on. The real issue is this - WILL YOU USE IT? If so, then go for it. Most have a money back guarantee, and even if you can’t get your money back, your losses will be minimal.
Generating Multiple Revenue Streams
When I graduated high school, the American dream seemed simple and attainable. It was just a matter of finding a union job at a factory, paying a down payment on a house and marrying my sweetheart. As most people will readily attest, things aren’t quite so simple anymore in this fluctuating economy of ours. For starters, the dependable industrial jobs are drying up steadily.
In order to protect my family’s nest egg in case I’m ever laid off from my day job, I found a way to generate multiple streams of income by utilizing a variety of affiliate marketing tools. Just as we are taught to diversify a portfolio when investing in the stock market, diversifying your employment skills helps to minimize risk. There are so many chances for a business income opportunity online these days that one would be foolish not to strike while the iron is hot.
Your Free Affiliate Marketing Program
Free affiliate marketing program? That got your attention, right? Although I’m not going to send you off to some guru’s long sales letter and opt-in email list, there is an excellent way to build your own free program. Anyone can do it, and I’ve outlined the steps below.
- Pick a niche. For our purposes here, it doesn’t really matter which one. Just pick something that interests you.
- Think up some keywords. What would YOU search for if you were looking for the product in question? Make a short list. If you’re really stuck, you can get a few more from the Google External Keyword Tool.
- Search them. Use Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
- View the ads and check out their landing pages. Do you see a lot of highly relevant ads? A lot of big companies, or more affiliates? What do their landing pages look like?
- Enter the landing pages in at Compete.com and Quantcast.com. Assuming that they get any significant amount of traffic, you can learn a lot about the sites.
- Enter the main offer’s URL at Compete.com and Quantcast.com, also. This is a great place to learn more about demographics.
- Use the primary demographics and create a fake Facebook account if Facebook marketing interests you. You will be served more relevant ads there, which should give you plenty of ideas of other offers you could promote, along with a lot more landing page insight.
- Spy on the affiliates, too. Enter their domains in over at DomainTools, or use an IP neighbors utility to find all the other sites owned by the affiliate you’re looking at. This can be a great way to see which niches are currently hot for a user. If you’re wondering whether a site they own is current, try putting it in over at Compete or Quantcast to see overall traffic volume over time.
There’s plenty more that you can do, but the main point is that there is SO much information out there for free. You can learn more than you can probably even process just by looking at what other affiliates are currently doing. What’s stopping you?
Do You Need Expensive Internet Marketing Tools?
It seems like you can’t go a single day without hearing about the latest and greatest internet marketing tools that will turn your business around overnight. There are even students who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars purchasing system after system and tool after tool, only to find that they haven’t really helped them.
All that aside, there are a huge number of internet marketing tools that are actually extremely useful, and which have the potential to help you get extremely wealthy. So why are so many people having trouble with the tools they buy? The top reason is because they buy expensive tools before they’re actually in a position to make money with them.
Suppose you purchased Google Cash Detective during the big launch last spring. It was around $2000, and many of the students who purchased it were not making a profit at all. In fact, after the purchase, some students had less than $500 in their advertising budget for actually using the product.
To be brutally honest, there is no paid tool that you actually need to make a profit online. There are tools to make it easier, and tools to improve the ROI of what you’re doing, but if you can’t make a profit without a tool, there’s a good chance that it’s not going to do what you’re hoping.
What does that mean? It means that you need to get in the trenches and start working hard and making some money before you invest in a tool. Education is different - if you need more knowledge on a particular topic, be smart and invest if you are fairly certain it will give you the knowledge you’re seeking. Hold off on the tools, though, until you have a bit of experience in the area it serves. Anything else is like putting a high-powered chainsaw in the hands of someone who can’t even use a simple handsaw. It’s too expensive and it won’t be used to it’s fullest potential.
Free Affiliate Marketing Tools for SEO Marketers
When you’re doing affiliate marketing, tools can make the job significantly easier. For SEO affiliates, the best tools are those that let you quickly and easily spy on competitors and locate potential link partners. To help out, we’ve put together a brief list of some of the most useful SEO tools for affiliate marketers.
- Yahoo! Site Explorer - To use it, simply go to Yahoo! and type in “link:www.sitename.com” where “sitename” is equal to the actual domain you want to explore. Here, you can view inbound links to specific pages on the site, or to the domain as a whole. It’s far more comprehensive than the same command on Google.
- SearchStatus Toolbar - This free toolbar consolidates Pagerank, Alexa Ranking, Compete Data, and whois functions into a single toolbar that sits in the lower right-hand corner of your browser.
- Google External Keyword Tool - This free tool lets you research potential keywords and get volume estimates from the largest English-language search engine.
- Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker - This free plugin lets you easily check your current rankings with the most popular search engines.
- Keyword Spy - Although the angle with this site is to get users to pay for the premium version, even the free data can be very telling.
As you can see, it’s actually very possible to accomplish a lot without spending money on expensive tools. What other free SEO tools have you had success with?
Twitter Tools for Affiliate Marketers
Twitter can be enormously useful for affiliate marketers, but the downside is that Twitter can also tie up a lot of your time if you don’t have the right internet marketing tools for the job.
Although your specific needs will vary a bit depending on whether you will be pushing endless streams of affiliate links or building a real brand that you can maintain for years, there are a few needs that all Twitter marketers have in common.
The Need to Follow Many Accounts -
It’s not enough to “tweet” cool stuff and hope that people find you. You have to go out and actively search for people related to your niche and then follow them in hopes of getting them to follow you back. There are a couple of great tools for doing just that:
- Twadder Pro
- SocialOomph
The Need to UnFollow Many Accounts -
Unfortunately, Twitter limits the ratio of users followed to users who follow you back. If you are following 2000 people, you won’t be able to follow anyone new until your own follower count nears 2000. If you’re been following a lot of account and you need to quickly unfollow those who aren’t returning the favor, you can use the tools below:
- Twadder Pro
- SocialOomph
- Twitter Karma
The Need to Schedule Tweets -
With any kind of social media marketing, it’s important to be consistent. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always make it easy and it’s not at all difficult to forget about tweeting for a few days here and there. If you schedule a large number of posts ahead of time, though, you not only save time by batching, but you ensure that your messages are delivered consistently.
- SocialOomph.com
By adding a few of these tools to your Twitter marketing arsenal, you’ll be watching the profits pile up in no time.
Top 5 Free Affiliate Marketing Tools
For a new affiliate marketer, it’s easy to get caught up in expensive affiliate marketing tools and ebooks. Although there are some great products out there, don’t let yourself be fooled into paying for tools that have perfectly good free alternatives.
Below, I’ve listed 5 of the top free affiliate marketing tools. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should give you a good idea of what you can get when you take a little time to look.
- Google External Keyword Tool - This is easily the best free tool out there for SEO and PPC affiliates. No one has better data about keyword search volume than Google, which makes this a great place to find and research keywords.
- PopShops.com - PopShops is a great tool for affiliates who want to work with datafeeds but don’t know where to start. With their simple (and free at the basic level) tool, you can quickly create SEO-friendly stores full of your affiliate links. You can also use their entirely free Wordpress plugin for quickly creating product blogs with one product per post.
- Quantcast - Quantcast is an outstanding tool for PPV or media buy affiliates who want to get a handle on who they’re targeting. By entering a domain in at Quantcast’s website, you get a wealth of information about who is visiting the site.
- SearchStatus Toolbar - The SearchStatus toolbar gives you easy access to a wide variety of data about the websites you visit. At a glance, you can see Alexa rankings, Compete rankings, and Google Pagerank. With a couple more clicks, you can get demographic data, do a WHOIS search, or check out old versions of the site through Archive.org. This is a great tool for affiliates who do a lot of competitive research or media buys.
- TubeMogul - Tube Mogul is amazing for video affiliate marketers, as it lets you submit your videos to multiple sites at a time. Although there is a paid version, the free version is still a great tool.
So - the next time you’re thinking of buying an expensive affiliate marketing tool, think before you pull out your credit card. There are a lot of tools worth buying, but make sure there isn’t a free alternative that would let you save your hard-earned dollars for something else.