Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
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 Coaching: Should You Seek Out Competitive Niches?
There comes a point in any affiliate marketing coaching relationship where the subject comes up – do you stick with low competition, low volume niches, or do you aim for the sky and promote weight loss, hosting, dating, insurance, or any of the other high-volume verticals.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. What’s right for one affiliate may not be right for another. Your abilities and your temperament will play a huge role in which is best for you.
If you enjoy risk, constant changes, and major volume, a high competition niche might be right for you. In these niches, affiliates working with paid traffic will deal with narrow margins and a strong need for good tracking. If you don’t have the technical know-how (or assistance) to get this set up properly, you’ll lose a lot of money – FAST!
If you prefer a slower, more stable stream of income, low competition markets may be more suitable for you. In these markets, you can frequently let the same ads run profitably for months or even years. Although you’ll rarely make a large amount on any one campaign, a hard worker can build hundreds of slow trickles of income.
So, to decide which you want to do, think about your personality and your lifestyle. Do you want to spend a lot of time at your computer, monitoring high volume campaigns? Do you have the ability to drop everything if something goes wrong? Or would you prefer to make a little less money and have more freedom from your campaigns? Only you will be able to decide.
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.
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.
Narrowing Down Your Options
With so many job opportunities offered online every day, it’s difficult to know where to begin. The law of averages dictates that not every home-based business can be successful, but there’s no doubt that many people make a lucrative living without ever setting foot inside a corporate office. The trick is to narrow down your online business ideas until you settle the perfect choice.
Most telecommuting jobs are offered on a contractual basis, and depending on the terms of the contract, you’ll be paid based on the speed and quality of your work. Other opportunities – such as affiliate internet marketing – implore you to recruit other business associates. If you’re a people person with formidable networking skills, affiliate marketing could be an easy way to make money online.
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.
Affiliate Marketing: A Mutually Beneficial Business Practice
In order to succeed in business, you need two things: capital and contacts. Capital is the seed money necessary to develop your business – the cash you would shell out to pay your employees, advertise your business and purchase inventory. Contacts are the major players in the industry who already have the smarts and the skill set to conquer the business world. Entrepreneurs face a unique dilemma in that they often lack the formidable capital required to enter the marketplace.
Luckily, an affiliate marketing program allows entrepreneurs to gain contacts who are in turn willing to share their capital. Large, successful businesses will call upon individuals to help them with the marketing aspect, offering payment in exchange for exposure. If an affiliate manages to direct customers to the seller, he or she is paid handsomely. This setup allows entrepreneurs to focus on one practical task: marketing.
Learning Affiliate Marketing for Free – Part 2
We’ve discussed learning affiliate marketing for free before, but it’s a topic that never really gets old. Today, I wanted to talk about how easy it is to get free copies of internet marketing and affiliate marketing training materials. Instead of repurposing other content for IM, you’ll be getting the core materials and classes for free.
- First, recognize that you can’t be as picky. Not all courses are available for free unless you consider yourself a thief.
- Become an active member of the affiliate marketing community. For example, if you are a frequent poster on Warrior Forum, you can frequently get sample copies of new and popular affiliate marketing courses in exchange for a review.
- Check affiliate marketing blogs for free materials. Many bloggers build email lists, and they offer outstanding mini-ebooks and reports in exchange for joining their lists. You can either create a “junk mail” account, or simply unregister as soon as you get each free bonus.
- Use forums and build your own courses. Often, you’ll find incredibly generous bloggers or forum members who write long, detailed posts on specific affiliate marketing topics. Gather a few together for the topic you’re interested in, and you won’t even need any fancy products to learn the material.
Although there are plenty of affiliates who have spent many thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars on different products, there’s no need to buy a huge number of affiliate marketing courses. Limit yourself to those which seem truly useful, and get as much information as you can for free. It’s all out there for the taking.
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!