Archive for May, 2010
Affiliate Marketing Training: Simple Ways to Make Money on Twitter
When it comes to making money with social media, no affiliate marketing training is complete without a section on making money with Twitter. As marketing goes, Twitter is actually pretty straightforward. After all, there’s only so much you can do with 140 characters. Still, there are a few strategies that top users have in common.
- Follow thousands of users and unfollow those who don’t follow you back. This is the cornerstone of most Twitter building activity. The only caveat is that you must do it at a controlled pace in order to avoid getting your account banned. Don’t follow more than 50-100 people each day, and don’t unfollow in the same day that you follow.
- Encourage retweeting. It takes creativity, but eventually, you’ll get the hang of how to structure your tweets so that other people retweet more often.
- Tweet to famous people. If you can get people to reply, that’s a lot of eyeballs on your Twitter username – not to mention a subtle endorsement that you’re “cool enough” to get a celebrity’s attention for a few brief moments.
- Try Sponsored Tweeting. If you’re not having much luck promoting products, you may still be able to earn a tidy sum by accumulating followers and getting paid to tweet.
Have you had much luck with Twitter in the past? My hunch is that, while plenty of people are earning money there now, the numbers will only increase as we get better ideas about how to deal with this particular marketing channel.
You Do the Marketing, They Do the Rest
We’ve all heard the old saying that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But what about all of those success stories we hear and read about all the time – those people who go from working at an unsatisfying dead-end job one day and making vast sums of dispensable income the next? Spotting a potentially lucrative opportunity is the first and often the most important step toward financial success.
Affiliate marketing is a concept that has flourished online in recent years. As its name suggests, the work is all marketing-related. There’s no cause to worry about any other aspects of the business because they are handled by an affiliate. An affiliate marketing system is ideal for burgeoning entrepreneurs because it allows you to associate your business with a well-established company and their product line.
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!
Affiliate Marketing Coaching: Improve Your AdWords CTR
Good affiliate marketing coaching should always be a combination of motivation, broad learning, and concrete tips that you can put into action right away. To that end, I wanted to pass along a quick tip that has served me extremely well over the years that I’ve been using Google AdWords to promote products.
As you probably know, click-through rate (or CTR) is an important factor in your cost per click, your quality score, and the overall success of your campaign. In most cases, a higher click-through rate is a good thing. The one exception would be if your high CTR comes at the expense of relevance or pre-qualification. Obviously, if your product is a paid product in a sea of free items, you will find that your click-through rate drops off when you include the price in your ad. In those cases, it’s usually smarter to keep the click-through rate lower to ensure that you’re only getting those viewers who might actually be willing to pay for your product. Sure, you may be a great copywriter, but it’s not easy to get people to pay for something when they’re thinking “free”.
So that example aside, let’s talk about how we can get a higher CTR for qualified viewers. Adding the keywords to your ad text helps, since Google highlights the keywords in ad copy. However, most people know about that and already do this. Bidding higher also helps, but we can’t all afford to do that.
Something you can do very easily, though, is to use an unusual symbol. This makes your ad stand out a bit more, thus increasing the number of people who read and click on your ad over the competition. You can use dollar signs, trademark symbols, copyright symbols, and almost anything else you can slip past the AdWords reviewers.
Do you have any other tips for improving the CTR of your AdWords ads? Feel free to share in the comments!
Affiliate Marketing Coaching: Google’s New Structure
A lot of affiliate marketing coaching courses give you information as it was at one static point in time. It’s extremely rare to find a course that gives you information that will help you make money in the future, or make money on the latest changes in how things are done. Of course, we all know that these are some of the best opportunities, given that other affiliates haven’t always jumped on board yet. That’s why I’d like to take a moment to talk about how Google’s new search results format could help you make more money.
Have you noticed that they added a new lefthand panel to the search results? You don’t always see it, but it’s definitely there often enough to make a difference in how we use search engines. With these options, you can decide whether you want the basic results you’ve already been given, or whether you want to narrow down your results to a specific type of entries (like books or shopping items).
What’s interesting is that very few sites are optimizing for these new options, and there is surprisingly little competition in certain categories (like blogs). When you’re looking at a keyword now, don’t just look at the main results. You should also look at the different categories and see if there are any specific opportunities in one or more categories. These opportunities won’t be around and wide open forever, but it’s worth looking at now to see what you can do.
CPA Marketing: Lead Gen Ideas You Can Use
Lead generation offers are a cornerstone of any CPA marketing network. Although you will find a fair number of per-sale offers, it’s the lead generation offers that are most popular. They tend to be a bit easier across many traffic sources, especially since they don’t require users to get out a credit card.
To promote lead generation offers, you need to think about the mindset of your user and how you can locate that user. Let’s consider a few examples.
- For a scholarship lead-gen offer, you want to find people who are either in high school, or who may have skipped/dropped out of college the first time around. Sites like Facebook and Yahoo! Answers are especially effective for these markets.
- For auto financing leads, think of who would be in the market to buy a car. People searching for the names of dealership or car models may be especially likely targets. Search engine PPC marketing is a great choice for getting at these people.
- Particularly unusual offers can be easy targets for low-volume campaigns. Take, for example, an offer seeking motorized wheelchair leads. You’ll find the competition is much lower, but you’ll also find that the volume is lower. For most of us, that’s just fine (though we’d all love to have a $1000/day campaign).
Have you ever used any peculiar lead gen angles? Let us know in the comments!
Internet Marketing System for Dummies
Have you ever felt like you needed an internet marketing system for dummies? A lot of us have. Even established affiliate marketers can feel like hopeless newbies when trying out new methods and markets. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful, though. What you need is a system that helps you focus.
There are a few things you’ll find with almost any successful affiliate:
- Focus – Successful affiliates don’t attempt to learn and master article marketing, social media marketing, SEO, PPC, and PPV all at once. They focus on just one or two methods and they master them before moving on.
- Discipline - A successful affiliate is the one who keeps at it day after day. You’re going to get much farther by working on your marketing for an hour or two each day than if you put in an overnighter every couple of weeks. That’s the kind of behavior that moves your efforts from “hobby” to “career”.
- Support system – If you don’t have a cheerleader, get one. It can be your best friend, your wife, your mom, or a total stranger on the internet. The important thing is that you have someone who understands and holds you accountable. That’s a common strategy for weight loss, fitness, studying, and pretty much anything else that requires significant long-term effort.
Do you have these things? Is there anything else you’d recommend adding to your personal affiliate marketing system?
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!
Internet Marketing Ideas That Work
All too often, you see people acting like all internet marketing ideas need to be complicated. Guess what? They don’t. In fact, simple is often better. If you’ve been frustrated at the need for complex systems and technical knowledge, consider these tips.
- Take a guru’s tactic and apply it to something totally different. Is everyone making review-style landing pages for software products? Maybe you should make a review-style lander for vacuum cleaners or learn guitar courses or foreign language classes instead. And of course, use the required disclosure somewhere on the page.
- Use a tactic from another industry. You don’t have to read internet marketing blogs to get all of your internet marketing ideas. Take note of another industry that interests you and keep up with its news. Regardless of what you choose, you’ll pick up all kinds of neat tricks that you can apply to internet marketing. You’ll also put yourself ahead of pretty much any other affiliates who try to promote that niche, since you’ll have so much more insight.
- Stick with one method. You don’t have to master every internet marketing method to be successful. In fact, a lot of the “gurus” are completely clueless about methods outside of just one or two things that helped them make most of their money. If you talk to them about anything else, you’ll quickly see how fast their confidence fades.
Overall, the moral of the story is this – you don’t need a vastly complicated or unique idea to succeed. What you need is a unique work ethic!