Posts Tagged ‘online marketing training’
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.
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?
Affiliate Marketing Training Seminars – Should You Go?
If you’re on any affiliate marketing newsletter lists, you’ve probably been invited to pay for an affiliate marketing training seminar at some point. They’re often held in exotic locales or on cruise ships, and they’re almost always very expensive. Still, the prospect of getting face time with a known expert is always enticing. So – should you go? Consider this a good checklist for making the decision.
- Can you afford it? I don’t mean, “Can you scrape together enough by using 4 credit cards and selling your motorcycle?” If you can’t pay for it without too much pain, you’re better off staying home or waiting for a cheap conference like ad:tech or Affilaite Summit where you can do after hours networking for the cost of a few drinks or dinner.
- Are you already actively running campaigns? Not just one, but have you tested at least a dozen or more campaigns? If not, you’re not going to have a lot to show your instructor. Lack of previously tested campaigns can also indicate that you just don’t have the drive that it takes to make the most of an expensive seminar.
- Will you have testing money left over afterwards? If the seminar is going to blow your new campaign testing budget, don’t go. You’ll learn a lot more (in most cases) from actively testing campaigns.
- Are you expecting to become friends with the instructor? Don’t count on it. Teaching students has a tendency to make even the nicest instructors a bit jaded and sick of newbie questions. If you want to befriend someone, you’re better off getting successful and then approaching. They’re not going to view you as an equal if you’re their student.
- Will you have time to take action? If you don’t have time to run campaigns, don’t expect an event to magically energize you and help you find more free time.
If you can pass through this checklist without any issues, it’s definitely worth considering an affiliate marketing training seminar. Otherwise, stay at home for now and revisit the idea when you’re ready.
What is Affiliate Marketing With Incentives?
A lot of new affiliates join networks and wonder, “What is affiliate marketing with incentives?” They see the option listed by an offer (most often as a no-no), and they want to know what it involves, and why it would be banned.
Incentive marketing simply means that the affiliate is offering something to the customer in exchange for their lead or sale. The free iPod sites that were popular in years past are a key example. Users completed a number of offers and referred a certain number of friends, and in exchange, they received a free iPod. Other sites offer free downloads, cash payouts, or other prizes in exchange for filling out affiliate offers.
Although this method can work well for affiliates, advertisers don’t always approve. When someone is signing up for a product because they are getting a reward, they don’t always turn into good customers. This is especially problematic for lead-based offers, where customers give up nothing but their time to help the affiliate earn the commission.
Penalties for using incentives when not allowed are steep. At the bare minimum, your commissions will be reversed. Sometimes, you’ll be blacklisted from your network and even some others when your name gets out (remember, advertisers often work with more than one network). You should also note that many offers allow prize incentives, but not cash. These details are important.
It’s easy and tempting to use incentives, but you have to make sure that you know an advertiser or networks policies before you do it. Ignorance is never a good argument when you get busted doing something the advertiser doesn’t condone.
Affiliate Marketing Training That Works
I’m going to let you in on a little secret about affiliate marketing training. It’s one you won’t hear often, but it’s also one that anyone who’s been in affiliate marketing very long knows to be true. Here it is: There is no single magical program that will make you a millionaire.
“What??!” you’re thinking, “But what about all the sales letters and their promises??”
I’m not saying that sales letters are lying, or that you can’t find a system that will teach you things that can make you rich. Actually, what I’m saying is just the opposite. Virtually any recent, reputable training program out there can teach you the skills that you can use to create a solid income or even get wealthy online. What matters is that you follow the training, apply what it teaches, and continually work to improve and refine your skills.
It also matters that you choose a training program that teaches promotional methods that suit YOUR skills. If you can’t make a landing page to save your life, a course on PPC marketing with Google may involve too many new skills for you to have success in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand, if you can barely put together sentences in your chosen language, a course on article marketing probably isn’t the best use of your money.
Basically, I want to encourage you to stop buying every product on the market and to stop worrying so much about finding THE system. You may not find the right one on your first try, but ultimately, the system that is going to work is the one that suits your skillset and the one you actually follow through on.