Posts Tagged ‘affiliate marketing coaching’
Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Coaching Program
Entering a new business venture blind is never a good plan. If you’re new to the affiliate marketing business then chances are you’ll want to hire a coach. There are plenty of affiliate marketing coaching programs to choose from; in fact, there may be too many. It’s easy to get caught up in a scam if you don’t know what to look for.
When searching for an affiliate marketing coaching program you need to do some legwork. First, you need to set out specific, realistic goals for yourself. You’ll want to define how much money you want to earn and by when. With those criteria in mind you can start searching for programs that will help you achieve your goal. When you do find a program, read over the owner’s blog to get a better sense of how they conduct their business. Also check to see if they have a money-back guarantee. Remember, if something seems off, go with your gut instinct and move on to the next program on your list.
Building Upon a Great Idea
Most successful home-based business opportunities prosper as a result of an entrepreneur’s hard work and dedication. Inventiveness is not a prerequisite, however. In fact, it’s often better to capitalize on a preexisting idea by marketing the product or service to an untapped demographic. This is the basic philosophy behind every successful franchise. The man who operates your local McDonald’s didn’t invent the hamburger, after all.
Franchising opportunities are not limited to fast-food chains. If you’re thinking about starting a franchise of your own, begin by selecting an industry with potential for growth. In effect, this means looking online for new technologies and services that have not yet reached peak profitability. The internet has opened the door for more budding entrepreneurs to take advantage of large company’s brand name recognition through affiliate marketing training. Through these programs, you earn money for helping drive business to well-established corporations. Remember to be selective, but don’t be afraid to take a few risks if you believe the reward is worth it.
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.
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 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.
Affiliate Marketing Coaching: Hot Niches for 2010
What kind of affiliate marketing coaching blog would this be without the occasional niche recommendation? Anyone who’s in the affiliate marketing industry is probably well aware of the niches that went down late last year and early this year. Almost overnight, offers for acai products and other rebill schemes started drying up. Those that didn’t disappear became considerably less profitable as they started listing the billing terms more prominently. Credit report offers also stopped converting as well because of a new required disclosure on the pages.
So what’s working now? There are plenty of good offers out there if you know where to look. Let’s take a look at some of the top offers for the remainder of 2010.
- Dating offers – Dating has always been hot, and this year it will be even hotter with so many affiliates and companies getting away from the “sketchy” side of the industry.
- Auto insurance and warranty offers - These perennial offers will rise again because of their reputation for stability.
- Mobile offers – Most people aren’t quite sure what to do with it yet, but everyone knows it will be hot at some point in the near future.
- Physical products – Many of the affiliates who left networks like CJ and Sharesale will be headed back that way as CPA networks struggle to find new, diverse offers to fill the void left by rebills.
Overall, the theme for this year is a return to long-term, stable offers. If you keep your eye on what’s reputable and delivers value to the customer, you’ll do just fine.
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 
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
As a dedicated entrepreneur, you may be experiencing some frustration with the online job market. It’s never easy to get a solid foothold in a new, unfamiliar marketplace, but the task can be simplified greatly with a bit of quality marketing. In order to get the word out about your online business, you might want to consider joining forces with an affiliate or undertaking some affiliate marketing training.
Affiliate marketing basically uses the higher profile of one Web site to drive up traffic on another site through extensive linking. The financial benefits of this practice are self-evident, and it could truly be called a genuine money making system. Most affiliate programs in existence today operate under a revenue sharing system. In other words, the affiliate receives a cut of every sale made on a partner’s site.
A Great Way to Get Free Affiliate Marketing Coaching
A lot of people pay tons of money for affiliate marketing coaching, but there is actually one very easy way to get coaching for free. What a lot of affiliates don’t realize is that a huge number of e-commerce affiliate programs are run by someone who has experience in the marketing department of the company they work for. Even those run by outsourced program managers generally have close ties to the company.
What does that mean for an affiliate? It means that if you join a merchant’s program, you have access to a huge wealth of information about the company’s marketing. Too often, marketing departments just don’t have the time to branch out into every possible marketing avenue. By talking to the progam managers about what has worked, you’re going to get keen insight that few other affiliates will ever have.
Affiliate managers can tell you what the average customer is like, which customers make the largest average orders, and what promotional methods have been most successful for them. They’ll also be able to tell you about areas they want to explore but haven’t had the time or funds to get around to.
A good affiliate is a partner to the merchant. That means that merchants are generally willing to help out their affiliates in any way possible. Don’t be afraid to make the most of that – far too few affiliates realize what a great resource their affiliate managers and merchants can be.