Posts Tagged ‘Online Marketing’
Affiliate Marketing Coaching: Google’s New Structure
A lot of affiliate marketing coaching courses give you information as it was at one static point in time. It’s extremely rare to find a course that gives you information that will help you make money in the future, or make money on the latest changes in how things are done. Of course, we all know that these are some of the best opportunities, given that other affiliates haven’t always jumped on board yet. That’s why I’d like to take a moment to talk about how Google’s new search results format could help you make more money.
Have you noticed that they added a new lefthand panel to the search results? You don’t always see it, but it’s definitely there often enough to make a difference in how we use search engines. With these options, you can decide whether you want the basic results you’ve already been given, or whether you want to narrow down your results to a specific type of entries (like books or shopping items).
What’s interesting is that very few sites are optimizing for these new options, and there is surprisingly little competition in certain categories (like blogs). When you’re looking at a keyword now, don’t just look at the main results. You should also look at the different categories and see if there are any specific opportunities in one or more categories. These opportunities won’t be around and wide open forever, but it’s worth looking at now to see what you can do.
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?
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.
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!
Learn Affiliate Marketing For Free
If you’ve ever seen those $2000 online marketing courses from the gurus, you’ve probably wondered if there is a way to learn affiliate marketing for free. Luckily, there is. It’s entirely possible to learn affiliate marketing without spending a dime of your hard-earned money. You will, however, need a bit of spare time.
- Get the free guides. Plenty of gurus have free guides that they give out as a teaser to entice you to join their mailing lists. Just use a junk email address and enjoy.
- Just try it. Although this isn’t recommended for paid traffic sources, there are plenty of ways you can get web traffic without spending money on advertising. Make Squidoo lenses, write articles for Associated Content, or learn about SEO and build a site with a simple pagemaker. You have nothing to lose but a few of your free evenings.
- Get a job in online marketing. Companies can’t seem to find enough employees to fill their online marketing departments. It’s a new field and you don’t need a lot of experience to progress quickly. The best part is that you get to learn on someone else’s dime.
- Spy on competitors or sites that interest you. Look at what they’re doing to drive traffic and then figure out how to apply similar tactics to your own sites.
- Go to the library. There are plenty of books on web marketing. If your library doesn’t have what you’re looking for, they can probably borrow it through an inter-library loan.
Any other ideas for getting free online marketing education? Feel free to share!
Building an Affiliate Marketing System That Lasts
Every new affiliate wants to build their own affiliate marketing system, but few set out to build one that lasts. If you brought this to their attention, though, you’d find that a lot of affiliates are actually in denial of that fact. Maybe it’s because so few affiliates have proper business training. Maybe it’s just a case of misunderstanding reality. Maybe it’s just optimism.
Affiliates who start making money rarely stop to think about how they can broaden their strategy so that they’re less vulnerable to industry changes that could put them out of business overnight. They don’t think, “Well, I’m making good money with this PPC campaign now, perhaps I should use this earning time to build out some SEO sites that will also earn steady money.”
Any introductory class in Economics or portfolio theory will teach you that investing in a single area can give you big returns, but that it’s also very risky. With just one stock, a single market event can wipe out your entire portfolio in an instant. Do you want that for your affiliate business?
Although you don’t want to broaden too much before you’re making money, it’s always important to have some idea about your long-term strategy as you progress. And of course, put a bit of those profits in the bank!
What is Affiliate Marketing Like as a Career?
A lot of new affiliates wonder, “What is affiliate marketing like as a career?” Although it may seem silly, that’s actually a really good question. If you spend much time around affiliates at meetups and conferences, you’ll notice something that’s very clear if you’re looking for it – Some affiliates are in it for the fun and they’re enjoying it while it lasts, but others are in it for a real career.
How can you tell the difference? Well, affiliates who are in it for the fun are usually more interested in the parties and free stuff instead of the amazing wealth of knowledge to be had when hanging out with large groups of professionals. They typically have a few successful campaigns (sometimes even just ONE), and they’re spending the money as fast as they make it. They’re not thinking about what happens when trends or policies shift and kill off a big percentage of their income. They may or may not stick around, depending on how hard things get and how low their bank accounts get. There aren’t many places outside of affiliate marketing where you’ll see 24-year-old kids making $90k in a month and promptly spending it on a watch (all the while, living in mom and dad’s basement).
So how are the pros different? They’re different in pretty much every way you can think of. These are the guys and girls who are getting to know anyone and everyone worth knowing. They’re out there working the floor and looking for new traffic sources or promotional ideas, then they’re spending dinner with other affiliates and sharing notes. These people have proper business structures, they pay their taxes, and they always save for a rainy day. They’re planning for their next big step before their current income streams disappear. They’ll do ANYTHING to avoid going back to a day job.
Which of these types are you? If you’re not counting yourself under the second category, you need to figure out a way to change things before your current strategies stop working for you.
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?