Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category
What is Affiliate Marketing Doing For You?
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, “What is affiliate marketing doing for me?” In all likelihood, it’s probably given you a lot of frustration, a ton of gray hairs, and a new appreciation for a steady paycheck. If you’re successful, though, you’ve probably realized the amazing perks of doing well in this industry. Since it can be hard to stay motivated through the frustrating early months (or even years), consider all that you can get when you finally find success:
- Freedom – There’s nothing better than losing that Sunday night feeling of dread when the weekend is almost over.
- Income - When you’re working for a boss, you can give 50% or 300%, but you’re never going to get the full benefit of your efforts. If you bring your company an extra $1000, how much of that are you actually going to see personally? It’s nice to work for yourself and enjoy the full fruits of your labor (well, minus Uncle Sam’s cut, anyway).
- Swag – When successful affiliates go to conferences, networks shower them with silly gifts.
- Free Dinners - Decent affiliates can usually swing a free meal at an event like Affiliate Summit, or even just a trip into the hometown of a network they’ve worked with.
- Free Trips - The best affiliates don’t have to pay to get to conferences – their networks foot the bill.
- Contests – When you’re a top affiliate, you can enter network contests with confidence and walk away with huge bonuses to your normal commissions.
- Free Products – Physical products merchants are often very willing to send free review products or gift cards to their top affiliates.
Of course, any affiliate making a ton of money is probably beyond the silly financial rewards and swag – but it’s still fun to feel loved 
What kind of perks have you gotten from your affiliate efforts? Let us know in the comments!
Improve Your Affiliate Marketing by 200% or More
Do you want to know how to improve your affiliate marketing efforts by 200% or more? It’s actually very simple. Just sit down with a list of concrete goals. When you sit down and randomly say, “I’m going to work now,” you will probably start off without a lot of direction. Maybe you’ll check your email, then head over to a few affiliate networks to check your stats, then check your Facebook account or RSS reader…and before you know it, a couple of hours has passed and nothing is done.
To maximize your work-time effectiveness, pick out just a few tasks that you want to tackle each time you sit down at your desk. If you finish them early, get up and go enjoy yourself. You’ll start to associate the benefit of free time with your increased productivity. You’ll also start to develop some idea of how quickly you work.
When you make a to-do list, be sure that you break large tasks up into smaller, more manageable tasks that you can handle easily. Big tasks are intimidating, and you start to get frustrated when too much time passes between check marks on your list. You should also limit the total number of items on your to-do list. Over time, you’ll get familiar with how much work you can do in a sitting, and how much time you can spend before you start to get tired or ineffective. For most people, the upper limit in a given day is around 4 hours. That’s not to say that we can’t work longer, just that we start to compromise our efficiency and see diminished returns after approximately that much time has passed.
Once you get in the habit of using written to-do lists, you’ll never turn back. Successful people are those who have mastered focus, and your list will get you through the toughest part of it.
5 Minute Affiliate Marketing Coaching – Picking Keywords
Although a lot of affiliate marketing coaching sites act like keyword research is some incredibly difficult activity that’s shrouded in secrets, the basics are actually pretty simple. Below, I’ll walk you through a quick and dirty approach to keyword selection for SEO and PPC.
- Know your niche. What is your site (or page) about? Write down the first words and phrases that come to mind.
- Go to the Google External Keyword tool and enter in these words and phrases – try one at a time for better results.
- Look for keywords with the highest volume possible while still having minimal competition (and reasonable click prices). This is a highly subjective part of the process, as some niches are high competition but they also have high profits to justify greater advertising expenditures. Start off using a bit of common sense instead of trying to find a perfect formula or ratio. Over time, you’ll develop a sense for it.
- Optimize for your keywords and watch the results. Take note of which keywords lead to sales and which ones don’t. Try to see if there are any commonalities you can find among things that do and don’t work.
- Be prepared to fail often, especially at first. Trying to do this without a bit of failure in the beginning is like trying to learn how to walk and expecting that you won’t fall. It’s just silly. The important part is using each failed keyword choice as a learning opportunity.
That’s really all there is to it. Don’t get too hung up on KEI or gurus who say you MUST have a certain number of searches or a certain ratio of cost to competition – you’ll just spend a ton of time on analysis and your results aren’t likely to be that much better than anyone else’s. In fact, they might even be worse. Now get out there and start failing
Quality CPA Marketing
When it comes to CPA marketing, quality is of the utmost importance. If you send a lot of low quality leads to an offer, it won’t be long before you’re getting kicked off the offer and possibly even removed from the network (if it happens often enough). When it comes to the issue of quality, a lot of affiliates get defensive and argue that it’s the merchant’s responsibility to convert the leads once they get them. While there is truth to that statement, affiliates still have some responsibility to promote the offer honestly and to send over the best traffic that they can.
Suppose you’re promoting a free trial offer. Your goal is to send over people who are willing to try the free trial, but the merchant needs to see a certain number of those users turn into paid customers if they are going to be able to continue the offer. Although you could potentially visit all the freebie sites and tell people how to abuse the offer, that’s not a good idea in the long-run. It might get you a lot of initial commissions, but advertisers will quickly dump you when they realize that the people you’re sending are only after free samples.
The way to avoid this is to focus on sending people who seem like they will follow through. If possible, ask your affiliate manager or the advertiser for more details about the ideal customer. From time to time, you should also check in to see how the quality of your traffic looks. If it’s good, don’t hesitate to ask for a payout bump. Most advertisers can support increased payouts for those affiliates who are truly sending good traffic.
Although it’s tempting to go for the short-term profits, remember that you’re trying to build a long-term business. In order to do that, you have to think about how you can benefit yourself, the customer, and the advertiser.
The Smart Affiliate: Online Marketing for the Long Haul
To the average affiliate, online marketing is not necessarily a long-term endeavor. For those who haven’t yet found success, the focus is entirely on getting something – anything – to make a little money. The problem with that approach is that it’s desperate. Desperation, while useful as a motivator, can be a terrible thing when it comes to your business decisions. When you’re desperate, you tend to focus on the short-term, and on getting immediate results. That’s no way to build a long-term business.
If you turn your focus to a steady, logical plan for affiliate marketing, you’ll not only increase your chances of success, you’ll be building a real business. Far too many affiliates (even many of the “successful” affiliate bloggers that you see all the time) have built their businesses on one short-lived method. They quit their jobs, only to find out 6 months later that their method no longer works and they now have no income.
So how do you build a real, lasting affiliate business?
- Stay on the up-and-up – If something feels shady, it probably is. Don’t let yourself get sucked into things that could be considered illegal or unethical, as they’re not likely to last. That’s especially true now, as the FTC is getting more and more involved in the affiliate marketing industry.
- Diversify – Although you need focus when you’re first getting started, you should make efforts to diversify quickly after you start making money. That way, even if one source of income dries up, you’re still making money.
- Save and re-invest - Don’t make the mistake of spending all your profits or expecting to maintain a steady ROI. Things can change quickly, and you need to have a cushion.
What is Affiliate Marketing With Incentives?
A lot of new affiliates join networks and wonder, “What is affiliate marketing with incentives?” They see the option listed by an offer (most often as a no-no), and they want to know what it involves, and why it would be banned.
Incentive marketing simply means that the affiliate is offering something to the customer in exchange for their lead or sale. The free iPod sites that were popular in years past are a key example. Users completed a number of offers and referred a certain number of friends, and in exchange, they received a free iPod. Other sites offer free downloads, cash payouts, or other prizes in exchange for filling out affiliate offers.
Although this method can work well for affiliates, advertisers don’t always approve. When someone is signing up for a product because they are getting a reward, they don’t always turn into good customers. This is especially problematic for lead-based offers, where customers give up nothing but their time to help the affiliate earn the commission.
Penalties for using incentives when not allowed are steep. At the bare minimum, your commissions will be reversed. Sometimes, you’ll be blacklisted from your network and even some others when your name gets out (remember, advertisers often work with more than one network). You should also note that many offers allow prize incentives, but not cash. These details are important.
It’s easy and tempting to use incentives, but you have to make sure that you know an advertiser or networks policies before you do it. Ignorance is never a good argument when you get busted doing something the advertiser doesn’t condone.
Internet Marketing Training Tips
When you’re getting started with your internet marketing training, there’s an enormous amount of information and work to be done. To help you sort it all out and make sense of things, try these basic tips for organizing your work.
- Focus on one thing. Don’t make yourself crazy by trying to learn SEO, PPC, social media, PPV, and email all at once. You’ll slow down your progress and get very frustrated in the process.
- Make a list. Never sit down to work without a brief list of what you hope to accomplish. Unprepared work time is considerably less effective than time when you can focus and concentrate your efforts.
- Avoid crutch tasks. You don’t need to check your email 30 times daily. You also don’t need to read Twitter and Facebook every 5 minutes. Every 5-10 minutes, ask yourself if you’re really working and being productive, or if you’re just wasting time.
- Make sure your sources are reliable. Don’t fall into the trap of believing any random source you find online. If you’re reading a blog or ebook and it goes against everything else you’ve known to work, get another opinion.
- Limit your research and study time. Action is far more important than research.
Even though a lot of this seems intuitive, it’s much harder to do in practice. Giving real thought to your actions and work ethic will pay off, though. History has shown repeatedly that laser-targeted focus combined with action is what it takes to achieve real success.
3 Internet Marketing Tips You Can Use Today
There are literally hundreds of thousands of pages of internet marketing tips and related material that you could be reading right now – possibly even millions. All the same, sometimes it’s good to cut through the bulk of it and boil things down to a few simple tips that you can use to take action. Time is one of our most important assets, after all. Below, I’ve gathered three that have been extremely helpful for me.
- Less reading, more action. Deep down, I’m sure you know this. A lot of what we do to educate ourselves is really just a way to avoid taking action and potentially failing. Guess what? You’re going to fail at some point. It’s all part of succeeding. Before you leave your computer today, make sure that you take action. Never stand up from a work session without asking yourself, “What real action did I take to advance my business today?”
- No one else can do it for you. Just like anything else, it’s ultimately up to you to do what needs to be done, and to own the success or failure of your business. If you’re not doing the job, who is? Outsourcing is a great way to let you spend more time doing the kinds of tasks you enjoy most – but ultimately, you have to guide everything that’s getting done for your business.
- Focus. If you’ve spent months or years bouncing back and forth between methods, now is the time to stop. Pick one thing you think you have a good shot at succeeding with, then give it your all. If you get to the point where you know you’ve given it a fair chance and you’ve tried your hardest but it’s still not working, only then should you move on. Juggling multiple areas of expertise can work once you’ve mastered each area, but for a newbie, it’s just too much.
I hope that helps some of you – now get out there and make some money! Every day that passes by is another day that you didn’t change your life.
A Great Way to Get Free Affiliate Marketing Coaching
A lot of people pay tons of money for affiliate marketing coaching, but there is actually one very easy way to get coaching for free. What a lot of affiliates don’t realize is that a huge number of e-commerce affiliate programs are run by someone who has experience in the marketing department of the company they work for. Even those run by outsourced program managers generally have close ties to the company.
What does that mean for an affiliate? It means that if you join a merchant’s program, you have access to a huge wealth of information about the company’s marketing. Too often, marketing departments just don’t have the time to branch out into every possible marketing avenue. By talking to the progam managers about what has worked, you’re going to get keen insight that few other affiliates will ever have.
Affiliate managers can tell you what the average customer is like, which customers make the largest average orders, and what promotional methods have been most successful for them. They’ll also be able to tell you about areas they want to explore but haven’t had the time or funds to get around to.
A good affiliate is a partner to the merchant. That means that merchants are generally willing to help out their affiliates in any way possible. Don’t be afraid to make the most of that – far too few affiliates realize what a great resource their affiliate managers and merchants can be.
Learning Affiliate Marketing From Blogs
When you’re learning affiliate marketing, there’s a temptation for many of us to stick with guides or ebooks. Unfortunately, that’s like getting all of your education from textbooks. It just doesn’t do a good job of providing a comprehensive education. Just as with anything else, you need to combine your textbook education with real world experience and current news on your topic. That’s where blogs come in.
Now, before I go any further, let me emphasize that I am not trying to encourage you to overindulge in blogs. Too much is just as bad as too little. Action is vital.
Most affiliate blogs can be categorized into a few groups:
- General Affiliate Talk – These blogs are typically very broad, and they include a combination of personal performance reports, industry drama, and occasional news. Although they’re usually run by a single affiliate and they’re not always very regular, these can be a great source of sneaky tactics and general updates when something huge happens.
- Industry News - These blogs are usually written by multiple authors, and they tend to be updated more reliably than more general affiliate blogs. Often, these blogs are related to industry conferences or magazines with the funding to pay writers.
- Niche Blogs – These blogs are typically like the more general affiliate blogs, but with a narrower focus. Often, you can find blogs focusing on SEO, PPV, PPC, or social media.
To maximize your learning without spending too much time, try to choose a mix of blog types. If you notice a lot of overlap, there’s a good chance that you’re reading too many blogs. You can also try using an aggregator like AffBuzz.com, where popular posts rise to the top and the remainder can be scanned quickly on a single page.