Posts Tagged ‘Online Marketing’
Internet Marketing Tools: Google Trends
When we think of internet marketing tools, we often think of packages like Market Samurai or expensive software like Adobe Photoshop. If you think outside the box, though, you’ll find that there are thousands of internet marketing tools out there, many of them completely free. Google Trends is one of those.
Google Trends is useful because it lets you identify highly searched topics long before they show consistent volume in Google’s main search tool. Instead of reading vast quantities of news and paying attention to pop culture, you can spend 10 minutes with Google Trends to learn what’s hot.
But what good does that do? What if the topics you see have nothing to do with any of the products you want to promote? Does that mean that the results are worthless and completely un-monetizable?
Of course not! Where there’s an audience, there’s a product to be sold. Imagine this: Lindsay Lohan keywords are climbing the Google Trends list. You don’t know what product that might tie in with, but you DO have a basic clue about who’s searching for it. You can figure out what else that market is interested in, or what that audience needs, and then market that product or service to them.
Becoming a successful affiliate is not just about hard work. It’s true that you have to work hard (especially initially), but creative use of resources is every bit as important. By learning to harness unconventional internet marketing tools, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Internet Marketing Tools - Hot Trend for 2010 & Beyond
Unless you’ve been completely ignoring the affiliate marketing landscape, you’re well aware of the fact that internet marketing tools rule these days. A lot of people who would never consider an ebook will happily pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for marketing tools. But why?
If you’re a working affiliate marketer, the amount of time saved by using good tools can be enormous. If you value your time at $100/hour and a tool saves you 2 hours/week in tedious work, you’re going to value that tool at roughly $800/month. It doesn’t mean that you’d be willing to spend $800, but it does mean that you will have no trouble justifying $50/month.
When it comes to ebooks, the ROI can be much more vague. One good tip COULD, in theory, make you a ton of money. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t even seem to offer much in the way of original information, so the overall transaction can be very disappointing in many cases. When you factor in the time it takes to actually read an ebook, it’s easy to see why some people are cutting back in this area.
Have you personally noticed a difference in your buying habits? Do you get more tools or more ebooks? Let us know in the comments!
Affiliate Marketing Training: Do You Need Dedicated Hosting?
Have you ever found yourself reading an affiliate marketing training
course that absolutely insisted that you needed to buy dedicated hosting from their suggested host? If you’ve read many ebooks, you probably have. Ebook writers have strong incentives to make these kinds of suggestions, given the large commissions awarded to hosting affiliates.
I’ll be honest, though. Not every affiliate needs a dedicated hosting plan. It really depends on your budget, the amount of traffic you expect to receive, and the amount of variance you can reasonably expect.
If you can afford it, a dedicated server is ideal for almost any active affiliate. Multiple shared plans can work well, too, but they give you far less control over speed and reliability. You have no ability to know whether a single user on the server will do something to jeopardize the stability of YOUR site. A good hosting company can dramatically minimize the odds of that happening, but the best protection is knowing that you’re the only one on the server.
A typical dedicated server package will cost anywhere from $100-200/month or even more, depending on the features, customization, and the amount of support you need from a hosting company. For someone without a highly technical background, I would recommend getting a dedicated package with a well-known provider like HostGator that will give you the full support you need in the event of any problems. They can also give you a huge amount of help when it comes to security issues. Security is one area in which you definitely don’t want to leave things up to chance.
If you’re a new affiliate with a brand new site that doesn’t need to be able to handle thousands of visitors daily, a shared plan is most likely going to be the most cost effective solution. For example, if you’re building simple SEO sites, a niche blog, or a small datafeed site, shared hosting shouldn’t give you any trouble. On the other hand, if you’re going to be paying for very large amounts of traffic, it would be silly to use a shared host and risk paying for traffic that lands on a crashed site.
If you’re not sure about what you’ll need, talk to other affiliates or even your affiliate manager. If your budget can handle it, always err on the side of buying a better hosting plan.
CPA Marketing With Wordpress
In case you didn’t already know, Wordpress is a great tool for CPA marketing. Although a lot of us associate it with bloggers who don’ t make a ton of money, it’s also an extremely useful content management tool for those of us who know how to monetize a site. You can create a blog, a portal site, or even a standard landing page. Consider some of the ways you can use Wordpress as an affiliate…
- Make a content-heavy blog. Sometimes, you just need to focus on quality content. It’s great to make simple landing pages or direct linking campaigns, but it’s also smart to have some quality sites that will stand the test of time. Wordpress makes it exceptionally easy to do this.
- Make a flog. This isn’t exactly recommended, especially for US-based affiliates - but it’s a technique that many used for years. People would create a fake blog (flog) and then put in fake entries recommending affiliate products. People misunderstood the motives and bought the products.
- Create a simple landing page. Numerous software packages exist to turn Wordpress blogs into attractive landing pages.
- Use it to add credibility to your landing page. You can still use a regular landing page, but if you add a link to your blog, you can show people that you’re not just an affiliate, but a subject matter expert.
If you’re not familiar with Wordpress yet, you should be. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll have one more extremely powerful tool in your affiliate arsenal.
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.
Learn Affiliate Marketing at Your Day Job
A lot of people spend tons of money on online marketing courses, but they fail to realize that they could actually learn affiliate marketing at their day jobs. It takes a bit of luck and some strategy, but it’s absolutely possible to get paid while learning with someone else’s money.
Just as we all advertise products for merchants, there are thousands of merchants and companies out there that need help from in-house employees. Add that to the number of agencies looking for in-house online marketing help, and you’ve got a serious demand in a subject that colleges don’t really teach yet.
Consider that even the most experienced online marketing experts have just 10-15 years of experience. Most have more like 1-5 years of experience, though. What that means is that it doesn’t take much at all to rise to a position of authority. If you’re even a little bit good at what you do (and you’ll have to be, if you want to work for yourself someday), you will enjoy great benefits and frequent raises. In some cases, you can even coerce your employers to pay for training courses or networking events that will help you even more.
If you’re going to be stuck in a day job a while longer, you might as well try getting a job in your desired field. You’ll learn a ton, make great money, and have valuable contacts and insights for when you do branch out on your own. When you finally do get to the point where you’re working from home, you’ll be prepared for the challenges ahead.
What Everyone in Affiliate Marketing Should Know About New Twitter URLs
Most of us in social media affiliate marketing are aware of Twitter’s plans to change the way their links work. In short, their new plan means that it’s going to get much, much harder for the people who use bulk follower tools and spam complete garbage to anyone who will click on it. They realize that those types of promotions provide an extremely negative user experience, and they’re hoping to minimize that.
In the future, all links are going to be routed through t.co links (Twitter’s own shortener) and also through the Promoted Tweets platform. This means that they’re going to get significantly more data on what’s going on, and they will ultimately be able to cut off the traffic to a URL if they find that it contains malware or negatively affects the user experience. They’ll also be adding a feature where users can hover over the URL to get a bit of information about it before clicking. To anyone who has ever clicked on a compelling Tweet’s link, only to be greeted with some junky site, this is no doubt a welcome change.
A final added benefit of the changes is that the URLs will be even shorter than in the past, with sites like tinyurl.com or bit.ly. It just doesn’t get much shorter than t.co. For users who have a tough time keeping their Tweets short enough, this will be a great addition.
The main takeaway for us affiliates, though, is that we’re going to need to add more value to stay alive on Twitter. If you Tweet out relevant links that your followers enjoy, you will see nothing but positive changes with this new format. On the other hand, if you spew out as much spam as possible as quickly as possible, you’re going to find your profits hampered.
Any tips or ideas for dealing with the changes? Feel free to share in the comments!
Internet Marketing: Program Your Brain for Success
If you want to succeed in internet marketing, program your brain for success. I don’t want to discount the power of hard work, but sometimes, brain programming is a big piece that’s missing for people. Many of us walk around with tons of negative thoughts and emotional weights, and that’s just not healthy. As long as we have those kinds of problems, we’re not likely to realize our full potential in ANY field, much less one as competitive and desirable as internet marketing.
But how do you program a brain? How do you overcome years of hurt and failure and rejection to feel like you can actually succeed? It’s not easy, but it can be done.
- First, you have to minimize your exposure to negative inputs. Give up as much news as possible, cut off your negative friends, and change the subject when people start talking about doom and gloom and unhappy topics. No sense in adding any more of that to your mind.
- Set concrete goals and a timeline. Don’t make it so strict that you know you won’t be able to adhere to it, but do be ambitious. Tiny goals encourage tiny progress. Success is about striking a balance. Some people will tell you that you have to shoot for the moon, but if you know your schedule won’t allow you to work the necessary amount of time, either come up with a way around that or make goals that are ambitious for YOUR situation and attributes.
- Keep your inspiration close at hand. Do you want a car? A huge house? A boat? Fancy jewelry for your wife? The ability to build a shelter for injured birds? Whatever it is, get pictures and keep your goals close at hand. It will make the hard work much easier.
Do you have other tips for programming your brain for success in internet marketing? Feel free to share in the comments!
The New Affiliate: Internet Marketing Beginnings
To the new affiliate, internet marketing is a hugely daunting new undertaking. You have to learn about the industry itself. You have to learn the technical side of things. You have to be business owner, marketer, copywriter, and tech experts (in most cases, anyway). It can be hard to know where to start and what to focus on, but the tips below should help you get started.
- Avoid the technical as much as possible. If possible, start out by creating your website on a free service like Blogger.com or Squidoo. You have less ability to customize, but it will also help you avoid the technical roadblocks that stop so many new affiliates. You don’t have to own a website to make money. If you DO decide that you want a website, go with a simple shared hosting plan and use Wordpress or another template-based site manager to keep things easy. You can always make it more complex later once you’re already making money.
- Just do it. You’re going to screw up - many times, actually. We all do. The point is to get started and not let yourself get weighed down by reading and deliberating. If you’re using paid traffic, set a low daily budget and keep an eye on what’s happening. If you’re using free traffic, you don’t have to worry nearly as much.
- Sign up with just one or two networks. Don’t worry if you can’t get accepted at every network under the sun. You only need one network to make money. There’s no sense in wasting a lot of time learning the interfaces of every network at this point in time.
It’s tough getting started, but the key is not to get too discouraged or scared. If you can conquer your own personal issues, chances are good that you’ll be successful.
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?