Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
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.
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?
Learning Affiliate Marketing: Link Building Tips
Learning affiliate marketing is never easy. That’s why it’s crucial that you learn to focus on small skills in a specific area. In this case, we’ll talk about link building. Admittedly, this is a complex topic of its own, but we’re going to focus on the most basic elements that every affiliate should know.
- Check out your competitors’ links. Use the Yahoo! Site Explorer or the link: command at Yahoo.com and you can get a great list of up to 1000 of each competitors’ inbound links. From there, just contact the relevant sites and ask for a link, too.
- Create content that would be highly linkable. Reference materials are especially good for this. Just add a useful reference section on another part of your site, then contact quality sites that would be interested in that material. For example, a section of kid-friendly history resources would be of interest to many schools and libraries.
- Submit to quality directories. Don’t waste your time on submitting to thousands of directories. Instead, submit to the quality, human-edited directories and then get on with your life.
- Comment or create content on social media and blog sites with dofollow links. Use the SearchStatus plugin to figure out which links are followed and which links are nofollow, then focus your efforts on the sites that do not use nofollow tags.
Any other good linking tips? It’s a complex area, and there’s always room for more ideas!
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.