Archive for April, 2010
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.
Generating Multiple Revenue Streams
When I graduated high school, the American dream seemed simple and attainable. It was just a matter of finding a union job at a factory, paying a down payment on a house and marrying my sweetheart. As most people will readily attest, things aren’t quite so simple anymore in this fluctuating economy of ours. For starters, the dependable industrial jobs are drying up steadily.
In order to protect my family’s nest egg in case I’m ever laid off from my day job, I found a way to generate multiple streams of income by utilizing a variety of affiliate marketing tools. Just as we are taught to diversify a portfolio when investing in the stock market, diversifying your employment skills helps to minimize risk. There are so many chances for a business income opportunity online these days that one would be foolish not to strike while the iron is hot.
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!
Your Free Affiliate Marketing Program
Free affiliate marketing program? That got your attention, right? Although I’m not going to send you off to some guru’s long sales letter and opt-in email list, there is an excellent way to build your own free program. Anyone can do it, and I’ve outlined the steps below.
- Pick a niche. For our purposes here, it doesn’t really matter which one. Just pick something that interests you.
- Think up some keywords. What would YOU search for if you were looking for the product in question? Make a short list. If you’re really stuck, you can get a few more from the Google External Keyword Tool.
- Search them. Use Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
- View the ads and check out their landing pages. Do you see a lot of highly relevant ads? A lot of big companies, or more affiliates? What do their landing pages look like?
- Enter the landing pages in at Compete.com and Quantcast.com. Assuming that they get any significant amount of traffic, you can learn a lot about the sites.
- Enter the main offer’s URL at Compete.com and Quantcast.com, also. This is a great place to learn more about demographics.
- Use the primary demographics and create a fake Facebook account if Facebook marketing interests you. You will be served more relevant ads there, which should give you plenty of ideas of other offers you could promote, along with a lot more landing page insight.
- Spy on the affiliates, too. Enter their domains in over at DomainTools, or use an IP neighbors utility to find all the other sites owned by the affiliate you’re looking at. This can be a great way to see which niches are currently hot for a user. If you’re wondering whether a site they own is current, try putting it in over at Compete or Quantcast to see overall traffic volume over time.
There’s plenty more that you can do, but the main point is that there is SO much information out there for free. You can learn more than you can probably even process just by looking at what other affiliates are currently doing. What’s stopping you?
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.
Internet Marketing Training: What to Do When Your Commission is Charged Back
There are plenty of topics covered in most internet marketing training courses – how to pick a niche, how to buy ads, how to make a landing page, and so on – but very few cover the topics that matter once you start to make a little money. Like what do you do if someone rips off your landing page? What if you get angry customer emails that should have gone to the original merchant? What if your site gets hacked? They’re all issues that many of us will deal with, which is why I wanted to start talking about the topics you don’t always get in training courses.
To start off, let’s talk about something extremely common – the reversed commission. This is especially common on networks like Shareasale or CJ where the merchant actually manages the affiliate program. With CPA networks like Azoogle or Clickbooth, the network has in-house people managing things, so you’ll probably only get reversed if there is a serious problem with something you’ve done, or if the advertiser doesn’t pay the network (and most networks will eat losses from advertisers who don’t pay).
To begin with, you should figure out why your commission was reversed. Shareasale makes this easy because they require advertisers to choose a reason when they void your commission. If you don’t understand the reason, though, or if you aren’t given one, you should contact the affiliate manager directly to figure it out. That’s the only good way to ensure that you know what’s going on so you can prevent it from happening again. There are a variety of common reasons:
- Self referrals (many merchants do not allow this)
- Unapproved method of promotion (such as bidding on the company’s trademark)
- Non-qualified sale or lead. Many merchants do not allow you to receive commissions on their existing customers.
- Returned order. If the order was refunded, returned, or refused for delivery, you can expect to see your commissions reversed.
Whatever the reason, check to ensure that the reason was covered in the merchant’s terms of service. If not, you may be able to politely point this out and get your commissions back while still maintaining a good relationship. If the merchant is unwilling to provide a good explanation and stand by their policies, however, you may want to ask the affiliate network to step in and get your money. In this case, hurting the relationship is probably not a big deal, as you don’t want to work with a company that doesn’t pay you like they promise.
Have you ever had a commission reversed unfairly? Let us know in the comments!
Your FTC Compliant Internet Marketing Program
Lately, I’ve been seeing a number of cases where internet marketing program owners encourage their students to use promotional methods that are not FTC compliant. If you weren’t aware, the FTC has become increasingly aware of the shady flogs and rebills that have thus far been staples of morally loose affiliates. A while back, they released a set of guidelines that every affiliate should be taking to heart. Failure to do so can result in massive fines later down the road.
Although not everyone is taking the rules as seriously as they should, some networks are cracking down on affiliates who don’t stick to the terms the FTC has laid out. Clickbooth, for example, will ban your account if they catch you violating the rules, and they also reserve the right to keep any of your unpaid commissions if you’re caught. Other networks are a little less proactive, but if you get caught, you can guarantee they will not stand up for you to the advertiser or the FTC.
Although this primarily applies to affiliates using false testimonials or flog tactics, there are subtleties to their guidelines, and every affiliate should read their exact wording to ensure that all promotions are compliant. You can visit the FTC’s website here to get the full details.
Even though these rulings have made it tough for some affiliates, it’s good for the long-run. There are just too many ethical ways to promote products, and there’s no good reason to resort to deceiving or otherwise tricking customers.
Why Affiliate Marketing Tools Are a Good Buy
First off, let me just clarify that not all affiliate marketing tools are a good buy, and not all are a good buy for all affiliates. What I want to emphasize here is that, for an affiliate who is making any money at all, a tool can often take that income to the next level. Unlike courses, which fail to be useful after a certain point (in most cases, anyway), tools are designed to simplify tasks and improve efficiency.
Just as there are a lot of gurus who know what they’re talking about, there are also a TON who have never made a dime online. Unfortunately, those guys have made people skeptical of affiliate marketing products in general, and it makes a lot of new and established affiliates avoid products that could save them huge amounts of time and money.
The key is to be sensible, and to focus more on tools that streamline your processes as opposed to courses that will teach you something you already know. If you really need to get education on a specific area, there is nothing wrong with a course – but in most cases, you’ll find tools to be much more useful over the long-run.
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