Archive for June, 2010
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!
An Unlikely Source of Internet Marketing Training
You don’t have to seek out a guru to get internet marketing training. Obviously, that can be one great way to get training, but there are plenty of resources that can teach us more about effective marketing if we pay attention. In this case, I’m talking about a piece called “The Language of Advertising” that comes to us from Stanford University.
In this piece, they’ve taken different product categories and then figured out which adjectives were used most frequently in those product categories. Big deal, right? Actually, it’s a very useful study in how we market things. The ads they’ve analyzed come from big firms with huge ad budgets – enough money and experience to know what works. This data shows us that something as insignificant as one or two words can make a big difference.
Customers have certain expectations of different types of products. They want their banks to be reliable and trustworthy; they want their meals to be simple, healthy, and easy; and they want their office chairs to be ergonomic and comfortable. Sure, you could go on for several sentences about the way you’ve accomplished those things, and with some big ticket items, you may even have to. In general, though, what you want is to grab the customer’s attention and let them know that your product has what they’re looking for.
Too many of us in affiliate marketing get caught up in systems and courses and methods. While they can be helpful, we have to remember that in the end, we are marketers. When you nail the system and still manage to think like a marketer, you’re poised for success.
Internet Marketing: Program Your Brain for Success
If you want to succeed in internet marketing, program your brain for success. I don’t want to discount the power of hard work, but sometimes, brain programming is a big piece that’s missing for people. Many of us walk around with tons of negative thoughts and emotional weights, and that’s just not healthy. As long as we have those kinds of problems, we’re not likely to realize our full potential in ANY field, much less one as competitive and desirable as internet marketing.
But how do you program a brain? How do you overcome years of hurt and failure and rejection to feel like you can actually succeed? It’s not easy, but it can be done.
- First, you have to minimize your exposure to negative inputs. Give up as much news as possible, cut off your negative friends, and change the subject when people start talking about doom and gloom and unhappy topics. No sense in adding any more of that to your mind.
- Set concrete goals and a timeline. Don’t make it so strict that you know you won’t be able to adhere to it, but do be ambitious. Tiny goals encourage tiny progress. Success is about striking a balance. Some people will tell you that you have to shoot for the moon, but if you know your schedule won’t allow you to work the necessary amount of time, either come up with a way around that or make goals that are ambitious for YOUR situation and attributes.
- Keep your inspiration close at hand. Do you want a car? A huge house? A boat? Fancy jewelry for your wife? The ability to build a shelter for injured birds? Whatever it is, get pictures and keep your goals close at hand. It will make the hard work much easier.
Do you have other tips for programming your brain for success in internet marketing? Feel free to share in the comments!
Good News: Opportunities Are Out There
If you’ve been keeping up with newspapers or online sources, chances are you’ve read about mass layoffs and corporate downsizing. These admittedly harsh financial realities have drawn attention for good reason, but they’ve also overshadowed the flood of new Internet business opportunities. People need to rebound from this blow and avoid sinking into a state of despair. After all, this is still America; hard work and determination often seem to pay off in the end.
No matter their precise financial standing or tax bracket, most people want to earn extra income. Some are just trying to put their kids through college in the hope that they can live a successful life in the future. Others seek dispensable income – they desire the frills and luxury that come along with a successful business venture. Either way, the Internet is rife with ideas to help people get ahead and stay there. If you don’t know where to start, you might want to learn affiliate marketing. With little few barriers to entry and virtually no startup costs, you can begin earning supplemental income in no time.
For the Seasoned Affiliate: Online Marketing in a Changed Landscape
Even for the seasoned affiliate, online marketing can be a new and challenging landscape. Every day, new changes come up that make it harder than ever before. In the last year, we’ve seen new FTC guidelines, huge waves of Google AdWords bans, and major changes to the type of ads Facebook allows. For many affiliates – even 6-figure monthly affiliates – this has lead to a dramatic decrease in earnings. For many, it has been like starting over.
For those who are looking for new sources of income online, there are a few things you can do to stabilize things for the future to ensure that you never take such a huge hit again.
- Diversify. Too many affiliates have just one or two successful campaigns. That means trouble if something happens to one of them. Even if they’re not all huge, try to have a few smaller ones that you could live off of if you ever had to.
- Save Money. Don’t spend all of your profits. Save back plenty in case you need to go into experimental mode again.
- Never get complacent. Even if you are making $100k/month, you should still be testing new traffic sources and campaigns. That’s the only real way to maintain that level of success.
- Create something of value. I’m not saying that every site you make needs to be content-rich and Google-friendly, but you should have something that’s an actual “web property” if you are in this for the long-term. It could be a top-notch blog, a content portal, or a product, but you should have something you could actually sell (ie not just a landing page).
What do you think? Do you have other strategies for weathering the low points and creating a long-term income online? Share in the comments!
The New Affiliate: Internet Marketing Beginnings
To the new affiliate, internet marketing is a hugely daunting new undertaking. You have to learn about the industry itself. You have to learn the technical side of things. You have to be business owner, marketer, copywriter, and tech experts (in most cases, anyway). It can be hard to know where to start and what to focus on, but the tips below should help you get started.
- Avoid the technical as much as possible. If possible, start out by creating your website on a free service like Blogger.com or Squidoo. You have less ability to customize, but it will also help you avoid the technical roadblocks that stop so many new affiliates. You don’t have to own a website to make money. If you DO decide that you want a website, go with a simple shared hosting plan and use WordPress or another template-based site manager to keep things easy. You can always make it more complex later once you’re already making money.
- Just do it. You’re going to screw up – many times, actually. We all do. The point is to get started and not let yourself get weighed down by reading and deliberating. If you’re using paid traffic, set a low daily budget and keep an eye on what’s happening. If you’re using free traffic, you don’t have to worry nearly as much.
- Sign up with just one or two networks. Don’t worry if you can’t get accepted at every network under the sun. You only need one network to make money. There’s no sense in wasting a lot of time learning the interfaces of every network at this point in time.
It’s tough getting started, but the key is not to get too discouraged or scared. If you can conquer your own personal issues, chances are good that you’ll be successful.
The 30-Minute Affiliate Marketing System
A lot of us pay thousands of dollars for affiliate marketing help, especially those of us who have day jobs and don’t shy away at the idea of an expensive affiliate marketing system that can help us quit our jobs. The truth is, though, you don’t usually need that. To be certain, a good course can cut the learning curve down – but it’s not a requirement for success.
The 30-Minute Marketing System is incredibly simple and costs little or no money to implement. Each day, regardless of whatever else you do, spend 30 minutes actually DOING something. Not reading. Not thinking of ideas. Not idly typing in potential domain names. Spend 30 minutes each day creating content, building campaigns, tweaking your landing pages, or doing social media for one of your sites. Set a timer if you have to.
30 minutes is not a huge amount of time, and it puts pressure on you to accomplish a lot quickly before the time is up. It leaves much less time to sit around worrying about whether something will work or wondering if it’s possible to do something. Instead, you’ll just try it.
Now, if you’re already doing just fine with productivity, don’t switch to this system. 30 minutes will probably result in less total work accomplished. However, if you find that you’re never getting anything done, consider trying this for just a couple of weeks. As you start to break through your own productivity blocks, you may find that you don’t need the 30 minute timer any more. Or, you may find that you’re ready to move it up to 60 minutes, 90 minutes, or even longer. The points of this affiliate marketing system is to start taking action. 30 minutes is enough to get something real done, but not so much that you are going to be intimidated.
What do you think? Have you ever tried anything like this? Would you?