Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Marketing’
Affiliate Marketing Tools: Personality Traits You Need
When we talk about affiliate marketing tools, a lot of people immediately start thinking about things like AffPortal and AdWords Editor and TweetDeck. What we don’t think about, though, is the set of personality traits you need to succeed. When things are going badly, you need certain inner tools to get through the hard times.
- Persistence – Without it, you’re dead in the water. You have to have the ability to fall down and get back up, over and over and over and over…
- Optimism - If you don’t ultimately have faith that things will work out, you shouldn’t try something like affiliate marketing. Most people will fail, and you need to have faith that you won’t be one of them.
- Intelligence – It’s a sad truth, but you have to be at least moderately intelligent to succeed with most forms of affiliate marketing. No, you don’t need to be a genius, but there are a lot of different types of skills involved and you have to have the ability to learn.
- Curiosity – Constant learning is vital. You need to be curious enough to seek out new methods and apply them in new and unique ways.
- Reliability – Contrary to popular belief, most successful affiliate marketers are not guys sleeping in until 3pm, eating junk food all day, and working when they feel like it. The greatest success comes to those who treat this like what it is – a business.
What other traits do you think of as essential for affiliate marketing success? Leave your thoughts in the comment section!
CPA Marketing: Lead Gen Ideas You Can Use
Lead generation offers are a cornerstone of any CPA marketing network. Although you will find a fair number of per-sale offers, it’s the lead generation offers that are most popular. They tend to be a bit easier across many traffic sources, especially since they don’t require users to get out a credit card.
To promote lead generation offers, you need to think about the mindset of your user and how you can locate that user. Let’s consider a few examples.
- For a scholarship lead-gen offer, you want to find people who are either in high school, or who may have skipped/dropped out of college the first time around. Sites like Facebook and Yahoo! Answers are especially effective for these markets.
- For auto financing leads, think of who would be in the market to buy a car. People searching for the names of dealership or car models may be especially likely targets. Search engine PPC marketing is a great choice for getting at these people.
- Particularly unusual offers can be easy targets for low-volume campaigns. Take, for example, an offer seeking motorized wheelchair leads. You’ll find the competition is much lower, but you’ll also find that the volume is lower. For most of us, that’s just fine (though we’d all love to have a $1000/day campaign).
Have you ever used any peculiar lead gen angles? Let us know in the comments!
Internet Marketing System for Dummies
Have you ever felt like you needed an internet marketing system for dummies? A lot of us have. Even established affiliate marketers can feel like hopeless newbies when trying out new methods and markets. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful, though. What you need is a system that helps you focus.
There are a few things you’ll find with almost any successful affiliate:
- Focus – Successful affiliates don’t attempt to learn and master article marketing, social media marketing, SEO, PPC, and PPV all at once. They focus on just one or two methods and they master them before moving on.
- Discipline - A successful affiliate is the one who keeps at it day after day. You’re going to get much farther by working on your marketing for an hour or two each day than if you put in an overnighter every couple of weeks. That’s the kind of behavior that moves your efforts from “hobby” to “career”.
- Support system – If you don’t have a cheerleader, get one. It can be your best friend, your wife, your mom, or a total stranger on the internet. The important thing is that you have someone who understands and holds you accountable. That’s a common strategy for weight loss, fitness, studying, and pretty much anything else that requires significant long-term effort.
Do you have these things? Is there anything else you’d recommend adding to your personal affiliate marketing system?
Incentive Internet Marketing Tips
If you’re not familiar with incentive marketing, let me take this opportunity to explain what it is and offer a few incentive internet marketing tips. Incentive marketing is when you get users to sign up for an offer through your affiliate link in exchange for some kind of gift or compensation. If you give your friend $5 to sign up for Netflix under your affiliate link, you’re engaging in incentivized marketing. Some people will shorten this to “incent” or “incent marketing”.
Incentive marketing can be hugely effective in some cases. Take, for example, Facebook games. Games like Farmville and Mafia Wars are huge, but you may not have realized that they are incentivize marketers. They offer players special bonus items in exchange for completing offers. This actually had a negative PR effect in the not-too-distant past, as many of the offers they were promoting were deemed “unsavory” enough for Facebook to ban them. They’ve since cleaned up their act and they stick with more reputable offers now.
As an affiliate, you should be aware that views on incentive marketing vary widely. Some networks forbid it completely. If an offer doesn’t even require the user to get out a credit card, you can imagine the potential for abuse. Others, like most physical products networks, allow it with no problem at all. That’s because physical products tend to have lower commission rates and the user who makes a purchase has to make a significant actual investment.
If you want to start engaging in incentive marketing, make sure that you follow the rules. Know which networks (and which offers) allow incentive marketing, and make sure that you adhere to those policies. You should also be aware that many offers that allow incent marketing still don’t allow cash rewards – they require it to be an item or virtual bonus. Ignoring that can result in withheld payments and even getting banned from the network.
Have you ever dabbled in incentive marketing? Let us know in the comments!
Internet Marketing Ideas That Work
All too often, you see people acting like all internet marketing ideas need to be complicated. Guess what? They don’t. In fact, simple is often better. If you’ve been frustrated at the need for complex systems and technical knowledge, consider these tips.
- Take a guru’s tactic and apply it to something totally different. Is everyone making review-style landing pages for software products? Maybe you should make a review-style lander for vacuum cleaners or learn guitar courses or foreign language classes instead. And of course, use the required disclosure somewhere on the page.
- Use a tactic from another industry. You don’t have to read internet marketing blogs to get all of your internet marketing ideas. Take note of another industry that interests you and keep up with its news. Regardless of what you choose, you’ll pick up all kinds of neat tricks that you can apply to internet marketing. You’ll also put yourself ahead of pretty much any other affiliates who try to promote that niche, since you’ll have so much more insight.
- Stick with one method. You don’t have to master every internet marketing method to be successful. In fact, a lot of the “gurus” are completely clueless about methods outside of just one or two things that helped them make most of their money. If you talk to them about anything else, you’ll quickly see how fast their confidence fades.
Overall, the moral of the story is this – you don’t need a vastly complicated or unique idea to succeed. What you need is a unique work ethic!
Internet Marketing Tools for Twitter
In internet marketing, tools definitely make things easier. That’s doubly true for internet marketers who use Twitter in their marketing. It can be extremely time-consuming to sit and click endlessly, hoping a good percentage of users will follow you back. Then you have to delete everyone who didn’t follow you, and when that’s done, you have to find another group of people who might be interested in your topic so you can start the process all over again. It’s enough to make anyone crazy.
So, if you’re planning on working with Twitter in your affiliate marketing efforts, I would strongly recommend that you look into at least one tool to simplify your most common tasks.
- Hummingbird – A popular autofollow tool. This one also comes packaged with Anteater, a VERY useful tool for bulk deleting the auto-generated DMs that so many Twitter users send.
- Social Oomph – This is a good tool for accounts geared towards branding efforts. It’s not as good as some other tools for speed.
- Twitter Karma – Helps you figure out who is following you and who isn’t. Unfortunately, Twitter no longer allows it to use the bulk unfollow feature, but it’s still helpful for everything else.
Have you used any tools for building your followers quickly? If so, let us know more about what worked well for you.
Advertising in the Internet Age
For any business, one of the best things you can do to increase your visibility and boost your clientele is to advertise yourself effectively. While this used to be very difficult or expensive for people, the digital age has made it a bit easier. With the prevalence of the internet, it’s not only easier for people to start a business, but it’s also easier to market that business. While radio spots and television ads garner unprecedented exposure, they are usually far too expensive for the average startup.
That’s why so many people who are looking to generate an internet income turn right back to the internet for marketing. If you are trying to find out what is affiliate marketing or how to utilize social networks, there is a plethora of free advice to be had. There are so many forums where you can post videos or promotions for your business at no cost. Maybe you’ve created a funny and creative ad campaign touting your business. If that’s the case, post it on YouTube or other forums where videos can be posted and shared for free. Or you could even place an ad on Craigslist. Whatever the venue, if it doesn’t cost you can any money, all you are out is your time. And if it garners you any interest, you can count it as a success.
Affiliate Marketing & SEO: How to Make it Work
All too often, you hear people complaining that affiliate marketing and SEO just don’t go together. They complain that they’ve made landing pages that do really well with PPC, but that they just don’t have what it takes to rank well organically speaking. Having looked at many of those pages, I know exactly why that is.
- Too little content. This is the number one reason that affiliate marketers doom their pages to rank poorly forever. You just can’t expect to compete with real, quality sites when your page is nothing more than a landing page and 3-4 junky articles. Add a real blog, write content that a human might actually want to read, and stop complaining that you can’t compete with people who have put in 500x more effort.
- No inbound links. Google doesn’t give first page rankings to sites with no inbound links. It just doesn’t happen. Not unless you want to rank for something ridiculously unpopular and rare as “purplish blue sweatshirt with rhinestones in the shape of a cat”. Because you could rank for that with no inbound links…but that’s about it.
- Poor quality inbound links. Some affiliates realize that they need to build links, but instead of actually making an effort, they do something silly like buy a $15 directory submission package and then sit back to wait for their riches. No competitive niche is going to be dominated with a low-quality site and $15 worth of automated directory submissions. You need to put in the time and effort to see out genuine, high-quality, relevant links if you want to really see results.
- Unhidden affiliate links. It’s not that Google hates affiliates. In fact, there are many affiliates that do extremely well in Google’s search rankings. What Google hates are affiliates who cheapen and tarnish the overall user experience. Unfortunately, that’s most of them, which means that it’s much safer to hide your affiliate links with a PHP or .htaccess redirect. Why give Google a reason to doubt your intentions?
If you take these four points to heart, your affiliate marketing and SEO efforts will undoubtedly be more successful in short order.
Internet Marketing Program for SEO Success
If you’re doing SEO, you shouldn’t even bother without some kind of SEO internet marketing program. What do I mean by that? I mean that you shouldn’t attempt to do it all manually. When it comes right down to it, you’re going to waste hundreds, if not thousands, of valuable hours doing mindless tasks that could have been automated. And of course, we all know what that means – money lost.
One of the most time-consuming aspects of good SEO is finding potential inbound link sources. You have to manually enter your competitors’ URLs into Yahoo!, you have to look at each potential link partner, and you have to send them an email to see if they will link to you.
With software, you can run a report designed to give you a quick spreadsheet of that information, often with the “unlikely” link partners deleted. You can also use Hub Finders to figure out which pages are linking to multiple competitors. Those sites are often the ones most likely to link back to your site as well.
You can also use software packages to look over your site and determine its strengths and weaknesses. Instead of looking through your meta tags and keyword usage, a software can let you know exactly what search engines will think of your page.
Almost any SEO program can handle these basic tasks and many more. Do you use any specific packages that you’ve found helpful? What tasks do you most enjoy automating?
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.