Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category
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!
Learn Affiliate Marketing For Free
If you’ve ever seen those $2000 online marketing courses from the gurus, you’ve probably wondered if there is a way to learn affiliate marketing for free. Luckily, there is. It’s entirely possible to learn affiliate marketing without spending a dime of your hard-earned money. You will, however, need a bit of spare time.
- Get the free guides. Plenty of gurus have free guides that they give out as a teaser to entice you to join their mailing lists. Just use a junk email address and enjoy.
- Just try it. Although this isn’t recommended for paid traffic sources, there are plenty of ways you can get web traffic without spending money on advertising. Make Squidoo lenses, write articles for Associated Content, or learn about SEO and build a site with a simple pagemaker. You have nothing to lose but a few of your free evenings.
- Get a job in online marketing. Companies can’t seem to find enough employees to fill their online marketing departments. It’s a new field and you don’t need a lot of experience to progress quickly. The best part is that you get to learn on someone else’s dime.
- Spy on competitors or sites that interest you. Look at what they’re doing to drive traffic and then figure out how to apply similar tactics to your own sites.
- Go to the library. There are plenty of books on web marketing. If your library doesn’t have what you’re looking for, they can probably borrow it through an inter-library loan.
Any other ideas for getting free online marketing education? Feel free to share!
Affiliate Marketing Program Fact & Fiction
When you get started in an affiliate marketing program, you may fall prey to a number of common misconceptions. The fact is, in any industry where there is so much money and so much potential for the average person, there are going to be myths floating around. This post is designed to help dispell a few of the most common.
MYTH: Running a highly profitable affiliate marketing business is easy.
FACT: It can eventually become easy once you learn how to do things, start making money, and learn to automate certain processes. In the meantime, though, it’s some of the most time-consuming work you’ll ever do.
MYTH: You will get rich quickly!
FACT: Very, very few affiliates will get rich quickly. In fact, your odds are actually better in Vegas, according to the FTC. If you apply yourself and work hard (and often, have a bit of money to invest), you will dramatically improve your odds of enjoying the lifestyle you dream of. If you expect to put in almost no time and then get rich, however, you may be better suited in a more traditional career.
MYTH: Affiliate marketing is saturated / too crowded / no longer full of opportunity.
FACT: After talking to numerous affiliate managers, it’s clear that only a very small fraction of the opportunity in any given program or market is actually being used. There are so many different ways to be successful – just let yourself stray a bit from the herd.
MYTH:Affiliate marketing is a no-investment business.
FACT: This couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s definitely much easier than, say, opening up a 5-star hotel – but it still takes capital. You can make a pretty good living with free webpages and social media or SEO tactics, but you still have to put in the time. And of course, if you want to earn money from stuff like PPC or PPV or media buys, you’re going to need quite a bit of capital to get going.
Did you find yourself buying into any of these myths? How did you get over them? Or are there other common myths that drive you crazy?
Unique Ways to Get Internet Marketing Training
When people think of internet marketing training, they often think of online courses with long sales letters, or expensive seminars in big hotels. That’s a very narrow view of the possible ways to get internet marketing training, though, and this post will hopefully give you some other ideas about ways to hone your skills.
- eBay Sales – Even if you don’t want to sell products in the long-run, eBay can be an excellent way to get practice in online marketing skills. You’ll learn to test headlines, copy, product images, and possibly even some advertising.
- College - Even though most college don’t have a lot of good courses in online marketing, you can still use the opportunity to improve your writing (try a course in debate or argumentation) and marketing skills. You’ll also get the opportunity to network with other students who may be headed out into other areas of business, which can make for invaluable connections in years to come.
- Doing It – There is absolutely nothing to stop you from just making a free blog and trying your hand at different free promotional methods. In fact, it’s one of the best ways to learn.
- Working It – Despite the bad economy, companies have a hard time keeping enough semi-informed internet marketers on staff. It’s a new specialty and the demand for workers is larger than the supply. It’s also a great way to get a paycheck while testing out methods on someone else’s budget. Not bad, right?
Have you used any of these methods to get practice before launching your affiliate campaigns? What about something not included on the list?
The Failed Affiliate: Online Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
To a failed affiliate, online marketing can seem completely impossible. Most of these people just need a little distance to get some perspective, though. There are a million ways to make money on the internet, but most affiliate marketing failures can be narrowed down to just a few mistakes. I’ve covered some of the most common ones below.
- Failure to act. Successful internet marketing is not about having a magical technique – it’s a series of actions that are taken over time, with the cumulative effect of earning money.
- Failure to persist. Too many affiliates quit just before the point where they would have found success. You must stick with it.
- Failure to consider the human element. It’s not just a matter of putting up ads and figuring out the mechanics. You have to have some basic understanding of your market and your product if you want to be truly successful. That’s why it’s such a good idea to start off with markets you already understand, such as a hobby you enjoy or a field you’ve worked in.
- Losing focus. The fact that there are so many ways to make money means that there are a million ways to lose focus, too. When you add in online distractions to the real life distractions we all have, it becomes very easy to see why focus is a problem for so many failed affiliates.
Although just reading this list won’t help you get past the common problems that so many affiliates face, it will help you become more aware of them as issues in your own life.
Have you dealt with any of these issues? Feel free to share how you’ve gotten past them!
The Smart Affiliate: Internet Marketing for the Long Haul
To the average affiliate, internet marketing is about fast profits, regardless of how short-term the results may be. That’s exactly why the FTC has been jumping in to police flogs, and why Google and Facebook are making it increasingly difficult to use their advertising platforms. Most affiliates just aren’t in it to generate quality, long-term results.
That said, there’s a lot of money to be made (and gray hairs to be saved) in sticking with a long-term strategy in your affiliate marketing efforts. Next time you want to tackle a niche, don’t think of the fastest way to arbitrage traffic. Instead, think of how you could build a serious resource that would actually impress or help people. If you feel like you need to hide your site from human reviewers or resort to strange techniques to prevent bans, you’re doing it wrong. The point here is to STOP feeling like you’re earning on borrowed time.
But what if your site doesn’t make much money? What if you put in all that time and you’re still not earning much? Here’s the beauty of it – you can ask for help! With a lot of affiliate marketing, it’s scary to do that. Someone could rip off your landing page or steal your keywords. When you create a complex, valuable site, though, you put in a LOT of effort. Even if you show it to an entire forum and ask for suggestions, the odds of anyone copying you are extremely slim (especially since you’re saying it isn’t making money yet!) Even better, your first-mover advantage means that you’re already established in the niche, and competitors would have to work much harder to overtake your progress. You can’t say that about most forms of affiliate marketing. Building a quality site is so much more than just matching traffic to the advertiser.
I’m not saying you should never go for the quick money – but if you want a long-term, sustainable business, you should consider putting a couple of high quality projects on your to-do list.
Have you ever taken this approach? How did it work out for you? Let us know in the comments.
Internet Marketing Ideas: Go Independent
When it comes to internet marketing ideas, going independent is one that more affiliates should act on. If you’re like most affiliates, you probably have accounts with half a dozen or more affiliate networks. Unfortunately, everywhere you turn, you see tons of competition. By going independent, though, you can avoid a lot of that.
So what do I mean by going independent? Instead of going to networks like CJ and Azoogle, just leave them alone for a while. Instead, seek out programs that are run in-house. Often, you can find offers and products with little to no competition from other affiliates.
The main issue with going to independent affiliate programs is security. You have to be able to trust that your leads will be tracked and that you will actually get paid. The tracking part is pretty simple in most cases – just place a trial order and return it later once you’ve gotten confirmation that it tracked.
Trusting that you’ll get paid is a little harder, but affiliate marketing always involves a leap of faith. Even merchants on big networks can fail to make payments, so don’t think you’re any safer in those situations than going direct with the merchant. There are a few things you can do to make it less risky, though.
- Research the company. Have they been around a while? Are there a lot of complaints showing up in the search engine rankings? Do they seem responsive?
- Make them build up trust. Don’t sign up for a new program and immediately send $20k of traffic to their offer. Until they have built up trust, don’t send any more traffic than you can afford to lose.
- Trust your gut. If they seem shady, they probably are.
Have you ever tried using an independent affiliate program? Share your experiences in the comments!
Internet Marketing Tips – Skip Affilicert
After talking with a few affiliate managers over the last week or two, one of the best internet marketing tips I’ve picked up is this – skip Affilicert. If you’re not already familiar with it, it’s basically a site that checks you out as an affiliate (and calls a lot of people that you work with) and then declares you “Affilicert Approved”. While this sounds like a great idea at first, the reality is that the networks just aren’t buying that it makes you a better affiliate.
From what I’ve seen, affiliates aren’t exactly jumping on it, either. Numerous affiliate forums have declared it “useless” or even an invasion of privacy. The questions they ask are very intrusive, so it’s not hard to see where that complaint is coming from. Why give your personal information to yet another company?
If you really want to get accepted at a network, just pick up the phone and call them. Or better yet, if you’re able, meet up at a trade show and say hello in person. In an industry where so much happens on the computer, face-to-face contact can have huge benefits when it comes to trust. There’s nothing WRONG with Affilicert, exactly. It’s just a waste of precious funds that could be more effectively used for testing new campaigns.
Have you ever had trouble getting accepted to an affiliate network? Share your stories in the comments.