Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category
Internet Marketing Tools: Google Trends
When we think of internet marketing tools, we often think of packages like Market Samurai or expensive software like Adobe Photoshop. If you think outside the box, though, you’ll find that there are thousands of internet marketing tools out there, many of them completely free. Google Trends is one of those.
Google Trends is useful because it lets you identify highly searched topics long before they show consistent volume in Google’s main search tool. Instead of reading vast quantities of news and paying attention to pop culture, you can spend 10 minutes with Google Trends to learn what’s hot.
But what good does that do? What if the topics you see have nothing to do with any of the products you want to promote? Does that mean that the results are worthless and completely un-monetizable?
Of course not! Where there’s an audience, there’s a product to be sold. Imagine this: Lindsay Lohan keywords are climbing the Google Trends list. You don’t know what product that might tie in with, but you DO have a basic clue about who’s searching for it. You can figure out what else that market is interested in, or what that audience needs, and then market that product or service to them.
Becoming a successful affiliate is not just about hard work. It’s true that you have to work hard (especially initially), but creative use of resources is every bit as important. By learning to harness unconventional internet marketing tools, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Internet Marketing Tips - Finding Independent Affiliate Programs
One of the best internet marketing tips I’ve ever received is to look for independent affiliate programs. Once you get outside the big affiliate networks, you’ll find programs that have fewer competing affiliates, along with better payouts (because they’re not paying a network to take part of your commission).
Of course, the fact that independent affiliate programs aren’t in a big network also makes them harder to find. It’s not impossible, but it’s definitely not as easy.
The best place to find independent affiliate programs is in affiliate directories. These directories lump many independent programs together so you can view quite a few in a short time.
Of course, you may not find what you’re looking for in the directories you check. If that happens, the next best course of action is to pick your niche, then search relevant keywords until you can find merchants in that market. From there, do a couple of things to see if they have affiliate programs:
-Check the footer, sidebar, and other on-site links to see if they have details about an affiliate program.
-Google the merchant’s name + “affiliate program” to see if anything comes up.
-If those two options don’t work, just contact the merchant. Most retailers of any size do have affiliate programs, and even if they don’t, they won’t exactly be unhappy to hear from people who want to promote their website.
Do you have any special tricks for finding juicy independent affiliate programs? If so, let us know in the comments!
Affiliate Marketing Training: Do You Need Dedicated Hosting?
Have you ever found yourself reading an affiliate marketing training
course that absolutely insisted that you needed to buy dedicated hosting from their suggested host? If you’ve read many ebooks, you probably have. Ebook writers have strong incentives to make these kinds of suggestions, given the large commissions awarded to hosting affiliates.
I’ll be honest, though. Not every affiliate needs a dedicated hosting plan. It really depends on your budget, the amount of traffic you expect to receive, and the amount of variance you can reasonably expect.
If you can afford it, a dedicated server is ideal for almost any active affiliate. Multiple shared plans can work well, too, but they give you far less control over speed and reliability. You have no ability to know whether a single user on the server will do something to jeopardize the stability of YOUR site. A good hosting company can dramatically minimize the odds of that happening, but the best protection is knowing that you’re the only one on the server.
A typical dedicated server package will cost anywhere from $100-200/month or even more, depending on the features, customization, and the amount of support you need from a hosting company. For someone without a highly technical background, I would recommend getting a dedicated package with a well-known provider like HostGator that will give you the full support you need in the event of any problems. They can also give you a huge amount of help when it comes to security issues. Security is one area in which you definitely don’t want to leave things up to chance.
If you’re a new affiliate with a brand new site that doesn’t need to be able to handle thousands of visitors daily, a shared plan is most likely going to be the most cost effective solution. For example, if you’re building simple SEO sites, a niche blog, or a small datafeed site, shared hosting shouldn’t give you any trouble. On the other hand, if you’re going to be paying for very large amounts of traffic, it would be silly to use a shared host and risk paying for traffic that lands on a crashed site.
If you’re not sure about what you’ll need, talk to other affiliates or even your affiliate manager. If your budget can handle it, always err on the side of buying a better hosting plan.
Learn Affiliate Marketing at Your Day Job
A lot of people spend tons of money on online marketing courses, but they fail to realize that they could actually learn affiliate marketing at their day jobs. It takes a bit of luck and some strategy, but it’s absolutely possible to get paid while learning with someone else’s money.
Just as we all advertise products for merchants, there are thousands of merchants and companies out there that need help from in-house employees. Add that to the number of agencies looking for in-house online marketing help, and you’ve got a serious demand in a subject that colleges don’t really teach yet.
Consider that even the most experienced online marketing experts have just 10-15 years of experience. Most have more like 1-5 years of experience, though. What that means is that it doesn’t take much at all to rise to a position of authority. If you’re even a little bit good at what you do (and you’ll have to be, if you want to work for yourself someday), you will enjoy great benefits and frequent raises. In some cases, you can even coerce your employers to pay for training courses or networking events that will help you even more.
If you’re going to be stuck in a day job a while longer, you might as well try getting a job in your desired field. You’ll learn a ton, make great money, and have valuable contacts and insights for when you do branch out on your own. When you finally do get to the point where you’re working from home, you’ll be prepared for the challenges ahead.
What Everyone in Affiliate Marketing Should Know About New Twitter URLs
Most of us in social media affiliate marketing are aware of Twitter’s plans to change the way their links work. In short, their new plan means that it’s going to get much, much harder for the people who use bulk follower tools and spam complete garbage to anyone who will click on it. They realize that those types of promotions provide an extremely negative user experience, and they’re hoping to minimize that.
In the future, all links are going to be routed through t.co links (Twitter’s own shortener) and also through the Promoted Tweets platform. This means that they’re going to get significantly more data on what’s going on, and they will ultimately be able to cut off the traffic to a URL if they find that it contains malware or negatively affects the user experience. They’ll also be adding a feature where users can hover over the URL to get a bit of information about it before clicking. To anyone who has ever clicked on a compelling Tweet’s link, only to be greeted with some junky site, this is no doubt a welcome change.
A final added benefit of the changes is that the URLs will be even shorter than in the past, with sites like tinyurl.com or bit.ly. It just doesn’t get much shorter than t.co. For users who have a tough time keeping their Tweets short enough, this will be a great addition.
The main takeaway for us affiliates, though, is that we’re going to need to add more value to stay alive on Twitter. If you Tweet out relevant links that your followers enjoy, you will see nothing but positive changes with this new format. On the other hand, if you spew out as much spam as possible as quickly as possible, you’re going to find your profits hampered.
Any tips or ideas for dealing with the changes? Feel free to share in the comments!
For the Seasoned Affiliate: Online Marketing in a Changed Landscape
Even for the seasoned affiliate, online marketing can be a new and challenging landscape. Every day, new changes come up that make it harder than ever before. In the last year, we’ve seen new FTC guidelines, huge waves of Google AdWords bans, and major changes to the type of ads Facebook allows. For many affiliates - even 6-figure monthly affiliates - this has lead to a dramatic decrease in earnings. For many, it has been like starting over.
For those who are looking for new sources of income online, there are a few things you can do to stabilize things for the future to ensure that you never take such a huge hit again.
- Diversify. Too many affiliates have just one or two successful campaigns. That means trouble if something happens to one of them. Even if they’re not all huge, try to have a few smaller ones that you could live off of if you ever had to.
- Save Money. Don’t spend all of your profits. Save back plenty in case you need to go into experimental mode again.
- Never get complacent. Even if you are making $100k/month, you should still be testing new traffic sources and campaigns. That’s the only real way to maintain that level of success.
- Create something of value. I’m not saying that every site you make needs to be content-rich and Google-friendly, but you should have something that’s an actual “web property” if you are in this for the long-term. It could be a top-notch blog, a content portal, or a product, but you should have something you could actually sell (ie not just a landing page).
What do you think? Do you have other strategies for weathering the low points and creating a long-term income online? Share in the comments!
Internet Marketing Ideas: Valuable Links for SEO
When it comes to internet marketing ideas, it’s not exactly revolutionary to come out and say that you need inbound links to rank well in the search engines. We all know that much. Google has made it very clear that they value sites that are valued by others (in the form of inbound links, which act as popularity votes). Among links, though, they’re not all created equal. There are definitely some links that are more valuable than others - but which ones? Below, we’ve covered a few of the most important factors in determining the quality of an inbound link.
- Anchor Text: Anchor text is crucial, as this is one of the best ways to tell Google what a page is about. If you want to rank for a particular phrase, it’s vital to have inbound links that use that phrase as their anchor text. This one small step will dramatically improve your ability to rank.
- Pagerank: Pagerank gives you a good idea of where a site stands in terms of inbound links. Ideally, you want as many links as possible from high Pagerank sites.
- Relevance: It’s not just about anchor text. If a site relates to your topic, the link is going to be worth more to you.
- Purity: If a link is purchased, it’s probably worth less than a non-purchased link. Obviously, it’s impossible for Google to know which links are paid in all cases, but it’s not too difficult to figure out the ones purchased through major link buying services. It’s also not at all difficult for your competitors to report you for link buying. The best case scenario is one where you build links manually and don’t buy any at all.
What other traits do you look for in your links? Although these are some of the top factors to consider, they’re not the only ones. Weigh in on the comments!
Internet Marketing Tips: Make Your Money Work for You
Here’s something you don’t hear with all the usual internet marketing tips that get passed around - the people who make the most money are the ones who make their money work for them. If you give two affiliates $10,000, it’s almost guaranteed that they’ll do vastly different things with it. Some people know how to magnify the power of money, while others just spend and wonder what happened.
- Work on someone else’s money. Plenty of credit cards offer long no-interest grace periods. Use this to your advantage. Let your money earn interest or buy things you must have, and use interest-free credit in the meantime.
- Get an interest-bearing checking or savings account. Never leave money sitting somewhere that prevents it from earning more money. That’s just common sense.
- Put any and all expenses on cashback cards. Even your groceries and bills should be paid with a cashback card whenever possible. Even if you can’t get a credit card, you can most likely get a PayPal business debit card that will give you 1.5% cash back.
- Keep track of every expense. It’s very easy to get lazy about receipts, but this is like throwing money out the window. If you can verify your expenses, you can nearly always claim them on your taxes. Self employed people get taxed enough as it is.
- Speed up your cashflow wherever possible. Think it’s not a big deal that your network pays you once every 2 weeks? Or worse, once every month? Well, it is. What if you were able to speed that up? You could get the money into an interest-bearing account faster, earning hundreds or even thousands more over the course of a year or two.
Are you doing all of these things? If not, why not? Do you have any other suggestions for improving the way your money works for you?
Affiliate Marketing Tools: Personality Traits You Need
When we talk about affiliate marketing tools, a lot of people immediately start thinking about things like AffPortal and AdWords Editor and TweetDeck. What we don’t think about, though, is the set of personality traits you need to succeed. When things are going badly, you need certain inner tools to get through the hard times.
- Persistence - Without it, you’re dead in the water. You have to have the ability to fall down and get back up, over and over and over and over…
- Optimism - If you don’t ultimately have faith that things will work out, you shouldn’t try something like affiliate marketing. Most people will fail, and you need to have faith that you won’t be one of them.
- Intelligence - It’s a sad truth, but you have to be at least moderately intelligent to succeed with most forms of affiliate marketing. No, you don’t need to be a genius, but there are a lot of different types of skills involved and you have to have the ability to learn.
- Curiosity - Constant learning is vital. You need to be curious enough to seek out new methods and apply them in new and unique ways.
- Reliability - Contrary to popular belief, most successful affiliate marketers are not guys sleeping in until 3pm, eating junk food all day, and working when they feel like it. The greatest success comes to those who treat this like what it is - a business.
What other traits do you think of as essential for affiliate marketing success? Leave your thoughts in the comment section!
Incentive Internet Marketing Tips
If you’re not familiar with incentive marketing, let me take this opportunity to explain what it is and offer a few incentive internet marketing tips. Incentive marketing is when you get users to sign up for an offer through your affiliate link in exchange for some kind of gift or compensation. If you give your friend $5 to sign up for Netflix under your affiliate link, you’re engaging in incentivized marketing. Some people will shorten this to “incent” or “incent marketing”.
Incentive marketing can be hugely effective in some cases. Take, for example, Facebook games. Games like Farmville and Mafia Wars are huge, but you may not have realized that they are incentivize marketers. They offer players special bonus items in exchange for completing offers. This actually had a negative PR effect in the not-too-distant past, as many of the offers they were promoting were deemed “unsavory” enough for Facebook to ban them. They’ve since cleaned up their act and they stick with more reputable offers now.
As an affiliate, you should be aware that views on incentive marketing vary widely. Some networks forbid it completely. If an offer doesn’t even require the user to get out a credit card, you can imagine the potential for abuse. Others, like most physical products networks, allow it with no problem at all. That’s because physical products tend to have lower commission rates and the user who makes a purchase has to make a significant actual investment.
If you want to start engaging in incentive marketing, make sure that you follow the rules. Know which networks (and which offers) allow incentive marketing, and make sure that you adhere to those policies. You should also be aware that many offers that allow incent marketing still don’t allow cash rewards - they require it to be an item or virtual bonus. Ignoring that can result in withheld payments and even getting banned from the network.
Have you ever dabbled in incentive marketing? Let us know in the comments!