Archive for August, 2010
Make Marketing Your Top Business Priority
As an entrepreneur, you can only do so much for your business. When most businesses are getting off the ground, there’s only enough seed money to pay a single employee. If you are operating as your company’s sole employee, it’s time to learn to prioritize. That way you can focus on the aspects of your business that lie within your control. Sit down at a table and begin drawing up a business plan.
It stands to reason that you can only sell products or services if people know you exist. For that reason, developing an internet marketing program for your business should be near the top of your list. You can find cutting-edge ways to spread the word online – on social-networking sites, message boards and chat rooms. By partnering with an affiliate marketing site that has already proven to be successful, you increase the odds of finding success in your own right.
Internet Marketing Tools: Google Trends
When we think of internet marketing tools, we often think of packages like Market Samurai or expensive software like Adobe Photoshop. If you think outside the box, though, you’ll find that there are thousands of internet marketing tools out there, many of them completely free. Google Trends is one of those.
Google Trends is useful because it lets you identify highly searched topics long before they show consistent volume in Google’s main search tool. Instead of reading vast quantities of news and paying attention to pop culture, you can spend 10 minutes with Google Trends to learn what’s hot.
But what good does that do? What if the topics you see have nothing to do with any of the products you want to promote? Does that mean that the results are worthless and completely un-monetizable?
Of course not! Where there’s an audience, there’s a product to be sold. Imagine this: Lindsay Lohan keywords are climbing the Google Trends list. You don’t know what product that might tie in with, but you DO have a basic clue about who’s searching for it. You can figure out what else that market is interested in, or what that audience needs, and then market that product or service to them.
Becoming a successful affiliate is not just about hard work. It’s true that you have to work hard (especially initially), but creative use of resources is every bit as important. By learning to harness unconventional internet marketing tools, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Bad Internet Marketing Ideas
There are a lot of bad internet marketing ideas out there. Sadly, the vast majority of independent internet marketers will never make any significant amount of money. These two facts are not coincidences. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of some of the worst internet marketing advice you could possibly get. Are you making any of these mistakes?
-If something doesn’t work immediately, switch to something else. You have to give something a fair shot before moving on, or you’ll never find anything that works for you. Even if it’s a good natural fit for you, remember that there’s always a learning curve.
-Don’t diversify. Stick with what works and make a killing. Even though it’s important not to spread yourself too thin or jump around from method to method, it’s also a good idea to diversify once you build one successful income stream. It keeps your income much more stable.
-Don’t tell your affiliate manager what you’re doing. It’s true that there have been cases of affiliate managers stealing campaigns, but this is such a small minority that it’s not worth getting too worried about except in the most extreme cases. In most cases, affiliate managers are people who want to help you maximize your income, not steal it. It might not make sense, but for the most part they’re people who value the security of a day job, or who lack the motivation (or maybe even the skill) to take your campaign and have similar success. Being too secretive, however, can ensure that you don’t get valuable insights from your AM or the advertiser.
-Skip the industry events. Although some people would argue that the money is better spent on testing or savings, industry events let you make valuable real world contacts in an industry where few people know each other in real life. They also have a huge motivational benefit. When you see what’s really possible, you’ll go home with a new level of determination.
What kind of bad advice have you gotten? Did you listen to it? Share in the comments!
See the Forest for the Trees
When you’re just starting a new business, your resources are severely limited. All too often, entrepreneurs get so bogged down in the minor details of running their business day-to-day that they fail to see the big picture. You’re only one person, and there’s only so much you can do to make your generate more business and add to your client base. It’s therefore important to take a step back and try to see the forest for the trees.
This means dedicating a few hours to draft a business plan. Sit down in a quiet place with all of the paperwork and ideas you have for the future of your home based business opportunity. List your plans in order of priority, and reserve the top spot for your internet marketing ideas. The Internet puts you in touch with more potential customers than you could ever hope to handle – it’s just a matter of finding creative ways to reach them.
Internet Marketing Tools – Hot Trend for 2010 & Beyond
Unless you’ve been completely ignoring the affiliate marketing landscape, you’re well aware of the fact that internet marketing tools rule these days. A lot of people who would never consider an ebook will happily pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for marketing tools. But why?
If you’re a working affiliate marketer, the amount of time saved by using good tools can be enormous. If you value your time at $100/hour and a tool saves you 2 hours/week in tedious work, you’re going to value that tool at roughly $800/month. It doesn’t mean that you’d be willing to spend $800, but it does mean that you will have no trouble justifying $50/month.
When it comes to ebooks, the ROI can be much more vague. One good tip COULD, in theory, make you a ton of money. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t even seem to offer much in the way of original information, so the overall transaction can be very disappointing in many cases. When you factor in the time it takes to actually read an ebook, it’s easy to see why some people are cutting back in this area.
Have you personally noticed a difference in your buying habits? Do you get more tools or more ebooks? Let us know in the comments!
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.