Archive for February, 2010
Learn Affiliate Marketing in One Month
It really doesn’t take long to learn affiliate marketing. If you have basic knowledge of using computers and the internet, it shouldn’t take more than a month to master the basics and start earning commissions. But where do you start?
First, you should understand the options. Figure out whether you’ll do your marketing through PPC, SEO, social media, email, CPV, or some other kind of traffic. If you’re not fully aware of the options, Google each one and figure out which one seems best suited to your skills and investment capital.
Once you do that, you’ll want to find a course in your chosen topic. Ideally, you should choose one that gives you a money-back guarantee. That way, if you find that the information is outdated, or that the support is lacking, you can look elsewhere.
In addition to your paid course, you should also seek out supportive blogs or forums on your topic. These types of sites can offer much more up-to-date information than the average course, and they can also be a good way to get different perspectives on the issues that go along with your chosen advertising method.
By applying yourself diligently to this sequence of actions, you should have no trouble learning the basics of a given affiliate marketing method in less than one month. While there are always subtleties that will take longer to master, the most important thing is that you start learning now and put those principles into action quickly. There’s no better teacher than experience, and you can’t get that until you begin.
Targeting a Demographic
Marketing is one aspect of business that is often overlooked in the early stages. As an entrepreneur, you’re probably in the process of creating a business model, selecting a product or service to sell and hiring full-time or part-time employees. But in order to build a serious client base, you’ll need to get the word out about your company. By becoming an internet marketing program, you can achieve that goal.
Online marketing is not so drastically different from what has come before. The future success of your business should provide all the incentive you need to get started. You should begin by targeting the specific demographic where you believe your product or service will be particularly successful. This might be a geographic area, an age group or even a group of people who share similar interests. Tailor your marketing strategy to appeal to your base.
The Facebook Affiliate: Online Marketing for Facebook
As more and more sites create their own self-serve ad networks, affiliates will have numerous new ways to drive traffic to offers. The upside is that is presents a lot of opportunity. The downside is that it can be difficult for affiliates to keep up with all the new developments. Of course, if you’re an affiliate, online marketing is probably enjoyable so that’s not much of a downside.
When it comes to Facebook, there are a few tips you can remember to improve your campaigns. Follow these steps and you’ll save hundreds or even thousands of dollars in trial and error.
- Figure out your demographics. Use sites like Quantcast and Compete to figure out who your audience is. It can be tempting to guess, but remember that the demographic you think would use a site isn’t always the right audience to target. Start out by following the numbers.
- Use images. Ads with images get far more clicks. Don’t handicap yourself from the start by skipping the image.
- Test, test, test. Before you spend much money at all, keep an eye on your click-through rate. Click-through rate is directly tied to your cost, so it’s crucial that you maximize it from the very beginning of any campaign.
- Be compliant. Just as with any other ad network, Facebook won’t hesitate to ban you if you’re not following the rules.
- Target by groups and fan pages. Everyone thinks of targeting by age and gender, but you can often find bargains and exceptionally tight targeting if you choose interest groups instead.
Advertising on Facebook doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, if you known your audience well, it can be one of the most effective platforms around.
How is Affiliate Internet Marketing Different from Other Types of Internet Marketing?
Even thought it uses many of the same techniques and tools, affiliate internet marketing is very different from other forms of internet marketing. That’s because affiliate marketers are working on behalf of merchants who already have their own sites, and by necessity, their margins are virtually always lower than what the merchant would earn by promoting his or her products alone.
Affiliate marketing is also different because there is a strong incentive for affiliates to link directly to the merchant or create intermediary pages with minimal content. Because of that, many ad networks, social media sites, and search engines make efforts to identify and remove affiliates from their systems. They feel that affiliate sites, on average, offer very little value to the user.
Because affiliates are often perceived as lower value sites, and because affiliate typically receive lower commissions, some might even wonder why so many people bother. Affiliate marketing is still an exceptionally good way to make money without the time, effort, and capital required to build your own business. If you fail in one area, you have the luxury of moving on without having invested too much of your own time and money. If something does well, you always reserve the option of producing your own product later if you want to increase your margins.
Flexibility is the key benefit of affiliate marketing, and it’s the main reason that so many affiliates prefer it to any other kind of internet marketing. There’s no need to worry about customer service, no need to invest heavily, and no need to worry about changing trends killing your business overnight. If that’s not enough to get you fired up and ready to dive into your affiliate efforts, you’re in the wrong field.
Focus: The Key to a Good Affiliate Marketing System
For an affiliate marketing system to work, it absolutely must be focused. This may sound obvious, but far too many new affiliates waste time learning numerous different promotional methods, when what they really need is to master a single method and find a bit of success before they try to tackle additional methods.
Affiliate marketing evolves far too rapidly for any single affiliate to become an expert in all promotional methods. PPC affiliates face constant changes in landing page rules with AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Bing, while SEO affiliates have to keep track of neverending changes to search engine algorithms. Social media affiliates, on the other hand, have to deal with the changing rules of each site they use, along with the way those sites are indexed and arranged. Simple changes can force affiliates to change their methods literally overnight.
Keeping up with all those changes can be difficult for even seasoned affiliates. There’s nothing worse than going on vacation for a week or two, only to come back and find numerous campaigns dead because of something that happened while you were away. As a newbie, focusing on one method makes it easier to be competent in your chosen area, and it reduces the amount of time needed to become successful.
Have you chosen your area of specialization yet? Or are you still spinning your wheels and wasting time reading about a dozen different techniques you won’t have time to implement? It’s time to take a hard look at what you’re doing and see if it’s really working for you.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
If you’re just joining us, you might be wondering how it is that so many people manage to make a solid living online without actually owning “real companies”. In this case, the answer is affiliate marketing. But what is affiliate marketing? Simple – I’ll explain.
Over the last ten years, thousands of companies have brought their businesses online, and thousands of new companies have started out online without even existing in an offline sense. Although these companies have ways to promote themselves online, they appreciate getting help from marketing specialists who know how to drive additional traffic and sales. In exchange for their help, those specialists get paid by the companies they promote. The vast majority of the time, companies pay out in the form of commission rather than salary. That’s so they can reward only those who deliver results.
If that sounds like a “sales rep” (to use a term from the offline world), that’s because an affiliate marketer is basically just a commission-only sales rep on the internet. The main difference, though, is that affiliate marketers generally work for many companies, and the relationship is usually more flexible.
Evaluating an Affiliate Marketing Program
One of the most challenging skills for a new affiliate is to learn how to look at an affiliate marketing program and figure out if it has a good chance of being profitable. Although it will take some trial and error to become reasonably accurate in your judgments, there are a few things you can do to shorten the learning curve.
- Decide what promotional method you’ll be using. If you’re using SEO or social media, the “cost” of a conversion may actually be quite low in terms of money spent. On the other hand, if you’re using AdWords, it’s going to be very difficult to profitably promote $1/lead offers without losing money.
- Determine how competitive the niche is. Competitive offers can be more expensive to promote, since other advertisers drive up the advertising costs.
- Come up with an estimated cost per conversion. This is where it gets tricky, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Figure out approximately what you’ll expect to pay per click (even if you’re advertising on a CPM basis), then try to get a realistic idea of the conversion rate you can expect. In per sale situations, 1-3% is a good place to start your estimates. For per-lead offers, try 10-15%. The exception would be if you have extremely targeted traffic, and in those cases your conversion rate might be higher.
Even though your initial guesses are probably going to be wildly inaccurate, you’ll get more and more accurate as time goes on. Learning to evaluate afiliate programs ahead of time will save you a lot of money in the long-run, though, even if your accuracy is less than perfect.
Why Affiliate Marketing Makes a Good Career
All too often, I hear people saying that affiliate marketing isn’t a good career. “It’s unstable,” they say. They complain that you can make a ton one day and nothing the next. And for some affiliate marketers, that’s true. It doesn’t have to be, though.
Affiliate marketing can actually give you a remarkably stable career if you do things right. Below, I’ve laid out some guidelines to making a steady income from affiliate marketing.
- When you’re getting started, keep your focus narrow so you can find success more quickly. Once you’ve started making money, though, begin to diversify your earnings. If you earn a lot on diet products, try diversifying with something else like auto loans or holiday gifts. If you have steady earnings in multiple categories (even if it’s not a ton), your income will be more stable.
- Work with companies you can trust, and never let a company owe you more money than you can afford to lose. Even established companies have been known to skip out on the bill if their advertiser doesn’t pay them. You can’t fully avoid that possibility, but you can make sure no one ever owes you too much.
- Build quality sites. Quick landing pages are great, but every affiliate should have at least one or two quality sites up their sleeve. Try to build at least one good site with real content. Guidelines are getting tighter all over the place, so it never hurts to have one extremely high quality site waiting in the wings if your others should get banned.
As you can see, affiliate marketing is not an inherently unstable career. Just like anything, there are choices you can make to put yourself in a more secure place – you just have to have the discipline to do it.
Internet Marketing Training That Works
How many internet marketing training systems have you tried? More than 5? More than 10? More than 20? There are a lot of people who bounce from course to course, constantly hearing about the latest and greatest new thing. They read the testimonials, they get enticed by the all-new tools, and they see the gurus buzzing. The problem, though, is that they fail to realize that the problem isn’t the courses they’ve been buying. It’s them.
Before you buy another course, stop to think about when the last time was that you actually finished a course and then methodically applied the knowledge to your work, giving it numerous tries before moving on to something new. If you’re like most people, you have probably never done that.
The very best internet marketing training is not the latest, flashiest, or most expensive course. It’s the course that you choose based on your interests and needs, and which you actually finish and follow through on. Without determination and follow-through, no course will help you.
Creating Your Own Internet Marketing Program
Never try to learn all you need to know from a pre-configured internet marketing program. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy internet marketing products – I’m just saying that it’s much more important to create your own course based on what you know to be your strengths and weaknesses.
Instead of looking for one simple solution that does it all, try thinking about it like you’re a teacher designing a school curriculum. Figure out what area you’ll be specializing in. Then, figure out exactly which skills you’ll need to get started. Remember, too, that you don’t need to know everything to start making money. You just need a firm grasp of the basics.
Once you know your weaknesses, seek out a combination of free tutorial, paid products, and mentors you could work with to improve your skills. Don’t forget the possibility of barter if you’re low on funds. By taking your learning into your own hands instead of letting someone else give you a one-size-fits-all program, you’ll get exactly what YOU need.