Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’
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!
Learning Affiliate Marketing for Free - Part 2
We’ve discussed learning affiliate marketing for free before, but it’s a topic that never really gets old. Today, I wanted to talk about how easy it is to get free copies of internet marketing and affiliate marketing training materials. Instead of repurposing other content for IM, you’ll be getting the core materials and classes for free.
- First, recognize that you can’t be as picky. Not all courses are available for free unless you consider yourself a thief.
- Become an active member of the affiliate marketing community. For example, if you are a frequent poster on Warrior Forum, you can frequently get sample copies of new and popular affiliate marketing courses in exchange for a review.
- Check affiliate marketing blogs for free materials. Many bloggers build email lists, and they offer outstanding mini-ebooks and reports in exchange for joining their lists. You can either create a “junk mail” account, or simply unregister as soon as you get each free bonus.
- Use forums and build your own courses. Often, you’ll find incredibly generous bloggers or forum members who write long, detailed posts on specific affiliate marketing topics. Gather a few together for the topic you’re interested in, and you won’t even need any fancy products to learn the material.
Although there are plenty of affiliates who have spent many thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars on different products, there’s no need to buy a huge number of affiliate marketing courses. Limit yourself to those which seem truly useful, and get as much information as you can for free. It’s all out there for the taking.
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?
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!
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!
Preparing for Learning Affiliate Marketing
There’s plenty of information out there about learning affiliate marketing - probably too much, in fact. What you rarely hear about, though, is the preparation for getting into affiliate marketing. Too many people enter the field with insanely high expectations and a huge amount of stress from personal situations - they’re going broke, they can’t pay their bills, they have sick kids, etc. It’s definitely less than ideal. While life is never perfect and the ideal never seems to happen, there are steps that you can take prior to throwing yourself into affiliate marketing, and they will make your life much easier.
- Figure out where you’re wasting time. We all do it. Whether it’s watching TV that doesn’t really satisfy us, or playing mindless games on the computer, or just spending too much time on the phone, there’s always a way to cut back on wasted time and make life more efficient. This isn’t about cutting out all the fun or ruining your relationships; it’s about being conscious of what you’re doing with your time and only using it for things that (a) must be done, (b) get you closer to your goals, or (c) make you deeply and truly happy. Ask yourself if each activity falls into one of those categories, and if the items that MUST be done can be done any more effectively.
- Simplify your life. Affiliate marketing takes money before you make money (in most cases, anyway). Sell off what you don’t need, eliminate as many monthly payments as you can, and cut back expenses wherever possible. Make sure your entire family is on board. When you’re not worrying so much about debt, it’s much easier to focus on doing things the right way.
- Explain what you’re doing. Make sure your family or spouse knows your plan, and understands why you’re doing what you’re doing. There are enough negative thoughts and influences without your family adding to it.
By actively preparing your life for the challenge of affiliate marketing, you will have a much better chance of succeeding. Learning affiliate marketing does depend on acquiring knowledge, but it also depends on defeating your own demons.
Affiliate Marketing Systems for Success: Have a Friend
A lot of us are very concerned with training courses and simple affiliate marketing systems, but there’s actually a better “affiliate marketing system” that anyone can take advantage of. It goes back to our days in school and the “buddy system”. Remember that? The teachers would pair off students so everyone would have a better chance of getting back to the classroom. The same thing applies with affiliate marketing. If you pair off with another affiliate, you’re going to have a much better chance of achieving profitability.
But why is it so much better to have a partner? There are a few reasons. First, a partner holds you accountable. If you don’t do any work on your affiliate campaigns, your partner is going to nag you. If you get frustrated, your partner can help you through it. If you have a question, you suddenly have two brains to pick instead of just your own. And of course, by providing those benefits to someone else, you’re diminishing the inherent loneliness in working on a computer by yourself all day.
Of course, an affiliate partner can also dramatically improve your networking. By having a close friend in the industry, you’ll gain access to their network, and you’ll be able to pair others in your network up with your partner as is appropriate. It makes you more of a “connector” and people tend to remember that kind of help.
In general, there’s no good reason to avoid meeting other affiliates and cultivating close relationships with those that fit you best. Whether you meet them on message boards, chat rooms, or real life events, the important thing is that you have someone to share the day-to-day grind with.
What is Affiliate Marketing Doing For You?
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, “What is affiliate marketing doing for me?” In all likelihood, it’s probably given you a lot of frustration, a ton of gray hairs, and a new appreciation for a steady paycheck. If you’re successful, though, you’ve probably realized the amazing perks of doing well in this industry. Since it can be hard to stay motivated through the frustrating early months (or even years), consider all that you can get when you finally find success:
- Freedom - There’s nothing better than losing that Sunday night feeling of dread when the weekend is almost over.
- Income - When you’re working for a boss, you can give 50% or 300%, but you’re never going to get the full benefit of your efforts. If you bring your company an extra $1000, how much of that are you actually going to see personally? It’s nice to work for yourself and enjoy the full fruits of your labor (well, minus Uncle Sam’s cut, anyway).
- Swag - When successful affiliates go to conferences, networks shower them with silly gifts.
- Free Dinners - Decent affiliates can usually swing a free meal at an event like Affiliate Summit, or even just a trip into the hometown of a network they’ve worked with.
- Free Trips - The best affiliates don’t have to pay to get to conferences - their networks foot the bill.
- Contests - When you’re a top affiliate, you can enter network contests with confidence and walk away with huge bonuses to your normal commissions.
- Free Products - Physical products merchants are often very willing to send free review products or gift cards to their top affiliates.
Of course, any affiliate making a ton of money is probably beyond the silly financial rewards and swag - but it’s still fun to feel loved 
What kind of perks have you gotten from your affiliate efforts? Let us know in the comments!
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?
The Smart Affiliate: Online Marketing for the Long Haul
To the average affiliate, online marketing is not necessarily a long-term endeavor. For those who haven’t yet found success, the focus is entirely on getting something - anything - to make a little money. The problem with that approach is that it’s desperate. Desperation, while useful as a motivator, can be a terrible thing when it comes to your business decisions. When you’re desperate, you tend to focus on the short-term, and on getting immediate results. That’s no way to build a long-term business.
If you turn your focus to a steady, logical plan for affiliate marketing, you’ll not only increase your chances of success, you’ll be building a real business. Far too many affiliates (even many of the “successful” affiliate bloggers that you see all the time) have built their businesses on one short-lived method. They quit their jobs, only to find out 6 months later that their method no longer works and they now have no income.
So how do you build a real, lasting affiliate business?
- Stay on the up-and-up - If something feels shady, it probably is. Don’t let yourself get sucked into things that could be considered illegal or unethical, as they’re not likely to last. That’s especially true now, as the FTC is getting more and more involved in the affiliate marketing industry.
- Diversify - Although you need focus when you’re first getting started, you should make efforts to diversify quickly after you start making money. That way, even if one source of income dries up, you’re still making money.
- Save and re-invest - Don’t make the mistake of spending all your profits or expecting to maintain a steady ROI. Things can change quickly, and you need to have a cushion.