Posts Tagged ‘affiliate marketing program’
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.
How to Choose a Good Affiliate Marketing Program on Shareasale
The methods for choosing an affiliate marketing program to promote will vary from network to network. CJ has performance bars, Clickbank has gravity, and others are a bit more nebulous. Sure, you could look at the EPC or CPC (depending on the network), but that doesn’t always tell you much. There’s a HUGE different in EPC when you have a few capable affiliates promoting something with PPC and using a landing page vs. when you have a couple of newbies submitting direct links to their favorite “get paid to click” networks.
With Shareasale, there are a few things you want to look at with any program. First, even though it’s not always useful, take a look at the EPC. If it’s zero, that’s a good sign that no one is promoting the program. Depending on how the site looks, that could be either a fantastic opportunity or a good warning sign. You’ll have to use your judgment on that one. If the average commission is high and the EPC is low, it could be a sign that either it doesn’t convert well, or that a lot of bad marketers are sending way too much untargeted traffic. It’s tough to make a judgment here, so just make a mental note and consider it in light of the other things you’ll uncover later.
Next, take a look at the reversal rate – both 7 day and 30 day. Some merchants batch process merchandise returns once monthly, so if you see an extremely high 7 day reversal rate and a normal 30 day reversal rate (5% or lower), it’s a good sign that their program isn’t as bad as the 7 day reversal rate would seem. If the 30 day reversal rate is high, though, steer clear of the program.
You should also look at the merchant page itself. Is the page attractive and well-organized? Does it look amateurish? Does it have a phone number at the top encouraging users to call in their orders instead of placing them online (thereby cutting out your commissions).
Finally, take a look at the average commission. If the average commission is $1.00, you’re probably not going to have much luck promoting the program with PPC or PPV marketing. It might work, but it’s highly doubtful. On the other hand, if the average commission is $80, you have a lot of room for advertising expenditure. Again, look at both the 30 day and 7 day figures to get a clearer picture of things.
As you get more experience in affiliate marketing, you’ll eventually develop your own techniques for evaluating merchant programs. For now, though, this list should help you get started in evaluating affiliate marketing programs on Shareasale.
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.
Affiliate Marketing Program Fact & Fiction
When you get started in an affiliate marketing program, you may fall prey to a number of common misconceptions. The fact is, in any industry where there is so much money and so much potential for the average person, there are going to be myths floating around. This post is designed to help dispell a few of the most common.
MYTH: Running a highly profitable affiliate marketing business is easy.
FACT: It can eventually become easy once you learn how to do things, start making money, and learn to automate certain processes. In the meantime, though, it’s some of the most time-consuming work you’ll ever do.
MYTH: You will get rich quickly!
FACT: Very, very few affiliates will get rich quickly. In fact, your odds are actually better in Vegas, according to the FTC. If you apply yourself and work hard (and often, have a bit of money to invest), you will dramatically improve your odds of enjoying the lifestyle you dream of. If you expect to put in almost no time and then get rich, however, you may be better suited in a more traditional career.
MYTH: Affiliate marketing is saturated / too crowded / no longer full of opportunity.
FACT: After talking to numerous affiliate managers, it’s clear that only a very small fraction of the opportunity in any given program or market is actually being used. There are so many different ways to be successful – just let yourself stray a bit from the herd.
MYTH:Affiliate marketing is a no-investment business.
FACT: This couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s definitely much easier than, say, opening up a 5-star hotel – but it still takes capital. You can make a pretty good living with free webpages and social media or SEO tactics, but you still have to put in the time. And of course, if you want to earn money from stuff like PPC or PPV or media buys, you’re going to need quite a bit of capital to get going.
Did you find yourself buying into any of these myths? How did you get over them? Or are there other common myths that drive you crazy?
Your Free Affiliate Marketing Program
Free affiliate marketing program? That got your attention, right? Although I’m not going to send you off to some guru’s long sales letter and opt-in email list, there is an excellent way to build your own free program. Anyone can do it, and I’ve outlined the steps below.
- Pick a niche. For our purposes here, it doesn’t really matter which one. Just pick something that interests you.
- Think up some keywords. What would YOU search for if you were looking for the product in question? Make a short list. If you’re really stuck, you can get a few more from the Google External Keyword Tool.
- Search them. Use Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
- View the ads and check out their landing pages. Do you see a lot of highly relevant ads? A lot of big companies, or more affiliates? What do their landing pages look like?
- Enter the landing pages in at Compete.com and Quantcast.com. Assuming that they get any significant amount of traffic, you can learn a lot about the sites.
- Enter the main offer’s URL at Compete.com and Quantcast.com, also. This is a great place to learn more about demographics.
- Use the primary demographics and create a fake Facebook account if Facebook marketing interests you. You will be served more relevant ads there, which should give you plenty of ideas of other offers you could promote, along with a lot more landing page insight.
- Spy on the affiliates, too. Enter their domains in over at DomainTools, or use an IP neighbors utility to find all the other sites owned by the affiliate you’re looking at. This can be a great way to see which niches are currently hot for a user. If you’re wondering whether a site they own is current, try putting it in over at Compete or Quantcast to see overall traffic volume over time.
There’s plenty more that you can do, but the main point is that there is SO much information out there for free. You can learn more than you can probably even process just by looking at what other affiliates are currently doing. What’s stopping you?
Why a Good Affiliate Marketing Program is More Important Than Ever
A lot of affiliates don’t really understand the importance of a good affiliate marketing program, but recent events have shown that it’s more important now than ever. At 2010′s Affiliate Summit West, the running theme with a lot of networks is that they are no longer recruiting new affiliates. Although they’re certainly looking for new, high-performing affiliates, many networks are cutting back on the newbies who use up the time of affiliate managers or who never make a sale.
Whether you agree with this or not, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s going to be harder than ever to get approved with affiliate networks – and harder to keep your accounts once they’re open. They’re focusing on nurturing their top relationships and seeking out the best potential affiliates, rather than holding the hands of newbies and training people who may never make a sale. In early 2010, Hydra struck a nerve with affiliates by dumping a huge number of their accounts and instituting minimum activity requirements for new accounts. Other networks have implemented similar policies in a less public fashion.
So how is a new affiliate supposed to get started when networks are demanding thousands of dollars in revenue or avoiding new affiliates altogether? To put it simply, many will not get started. Smart newbies, however, will flock to the affiliate marketing training programs that have allied themselves with affiliate networks.
Some of the top industry training programs have vowed to affiliate networks that they will refer qualified students through their referral links. Because the networks can be assured that the training programs will be helping the students, they have less risk of getting unqualified and overly demanding affiliates. Affiliates looking for training will now be looking for more than just training; they’ll be looking for access to the most exclusive networks.
Affiliate marketing is changing rapidly right now, and those who don’t adapt are going to be left out in the cold. If you’re looking for additional training in affiliate marketing, keep this in mind as you shop around. As networks you’d like to join if they have course recommendations. Even if they don’t partner with any yet, they’ll be impressed that you’re actively investing in your future success.
Learn to Spread the Word
Although the idea of inventing a valuable new product or service from scratch is certainly a glamorous one, it’s not necessarily realistic. Most inventors these days hold numerous degrees in the sciences, and they make their discoveries at the microscopic level. In truth, one of the best ways to make money online is to take preexisting ideas and give them a slightly new spin. In some cases, it’s as easy as finding an untapped demographic and making them interested in what you’re selling.
Just like with brick-and-mortar stores, market research plays heavily into the development and spread of franchises. The originator of the product or service will trust the company’s branding and reputation to a few select franchise owners, who will in turn spread the word to new customers. Online, this process is known as affiliate marketing. For an upstart business owner, learning affiliate marketing can be a smart, fool-proof way of getting ahead on the Internet.
The Elements of a Good PPC Affiliate Marketing Program
Because affiliate marketing is so technical and strange to many, the number of new marketers who seek out help in the form of training courses is huge. But what should a good affiliate marketing program include? It varies depending on the type of program, so we’ll start off by talking about what you should get in a PPC affiliate marketing program.
- Thorough details about the differences between advertising with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (unless they specifically focus on one and that’s made clear up front).
- Lessons on optimizing your ads for maximum qualified clicks – not just click-through rate. You want a high click-through rate, but not at the expense of relevant traffic.
- Quality score insights. Quality score is more important every day as networks struggle to eliminate low quality advertisers, and advertisers become more competitive with one another.
- Landing page tips, including dynamic keyword insertion. If a course is telling you to make a simple 5 page site, it’s outdated. Those old school tactics don’t cut it anymore with reputable search engines.
- Tips on picking good offers and products to promote through PPC.
Although a good course will include much more than this, you should consider these elements the bare minimum. If you’ve started out in a course that doesn’t include something you see here, it’s probably time to move on to a new course.
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.
Working with Affiliates
We all recognize that there’s plenty of money to be made on the Internet. It seems that everyday you hear about a new entrepreneur turning a simple, practical idea into a veritable goldmine. But the odds of your coming up with a revolutionary new idea that sets the Internet afire is relatively low. Most startup ventures get ahead by partnering with affiliate sites.
There’s an old saying that you’re undoubtedly familiar with: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Logic dictates that setting up a completely independent online business entity is infinitely more difficult than using a proven money making system. Affiliates do most of the work for you—which is one of the reasons that an affiliate marketing program is so attractive . They provide the inventory and knowledge necessary to make a business plan work. Most of your efforts can then be directed toward marketing.