Monday, September 15, 2014
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Important Strategies Every Internet Marketer Should Never Forget
It’s easy to get lost in the ocean of the interwebs…
As affiliate marketers, we sometimes wander aimlessly amongst the trees of information in the interwebs. It’s easy to get lost in the tsunami of ata out there, and when you’re lost, it’s easy to make bad decisions.
Careful planning and some basic strategy would normally get us out of situations like this or prevent that situation from happening in the first place. The sad part is that when some new fad comes along, people easily jump into the bandwagon only to find disappointing results.
When at a loss for solutions, one of the most important things you can do is get back to your core goals and strategies and re-think your approach from there. If you’re one of the many Internet marketers who currently have things over their heads, this post is for you.
Here are some of the most important strategies we tend to forget. Sure, they may seem basic to some, but even some seasoned vets sometimes get them lost in the shuffle.
1. Choose which business you’ll be interested in for the long haul. People often quit something when they think that what they’re doing isn’t as fulfilling as it should be. This is why you need to choose a market that captivates you and will keep you passionate and competitive for many years.
When you love what you’re doing, you do your best to learn everything about it. You also find it hard to lose enthusiasm and creativity whenever you’re caught in a fix. In other words, choosing a niche that you like will stop you from quitting prematurely.
It’s equally important to find an affiliate network that offers the niche you want to immerse yourself in. You should also take a closer look at the kind of merchants in the network. If the merchants seem trustworthy, credible and fair, go right ahead and jump in.
After shaking hands with destiny and signing up with an affiliate network or program, you have to consider how to market your products. A website and blog are great places to start the selling process.
Also, it’s a norm for affiliate marketers to produce an email subscriber list with which to send out offers. This isn’t exactly rocket science, but it isn’t THAT simple either. I’ll be writing a free report on how to do this, but for now, let it suffice for me to say that having a credible site, good landing pages and the right autoresponder tools are the keys to victory.
2. Make your site SEO friendly. I’ve mentioned in the past that a beautiful site is useless if nobody can see it. That establishes the importance of SEO in the affiliate marketing business. If no one sees the website you use to market your products, you won’t be able to drive sales to the merchant and you won’t earn any commissions. It’s that simple.
Google sees text content as search engine food, which is why you should get a blog. Does that scare you? Take it easy; it shouldn’t be too hard for you to make a lot of content about a niche that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about. If you love what you’re doing, you won’t have trouble writing about it. Even if you don’t have time to write, you can always hire a writer and work with him on building a steady stream of great posts.
An important facet of SEO is getting backlinks from other websites. Google and other search engines view backlinks as referrals or votes, and each one has an impact in how you rank in searches for your target keywords.
One way to get people who own sites and blogs to link to you is to have content that’s awesome and helpful at the same time. Keep in mind that your blog posts have to be both entertaining and informative.
Besides keeping your website and blog as rich in content as it should be, you should also add an RSS feed. An RSS feed allows people to subscribe to your posts, allowing you to reach out to them whenever you have new stuff published. An RSS feed is also a great way of extracting email addresses from your readers, which fattens up your mailing list used to pitch sales offers.
Use social media to drive traffic to your website. Try to connect to your customers by making a Facebook fan page, or by just adding them as friends. Drive more followers into your Twitter account by sharing your blog posts.
Make videos or podcasts in YouTube or iTunes and go viral. These are ways of gaining popularity in the interwebs. The more exposure you get, the higher the chances of other people linking to you.
3. Love your target audience. Treat your readers or subscribers the way you treat your friends. Make them feel special but at the same time show them that you’re a figure of authority and integrity.
Offer value without expecting any compensation. Try giving away things for free. Make a nifty free report that can really help them. You can also recommend some tools or services that are considered the best in their respective classes.
Nourish the trust they have for you by solving their problems from the get-go. This would eliminate the risk factor of losing a prospect’s interest and at the same time it gives them a good reason to believe in what you’re selling.
Eventually, you’re going to offer them something that requires them to pull out their wallets, and when that time comes, you don’t want to make them change their minds. Don’t be too aggressive when making a sale. When they purchase, thank them and continue to provide the best of what you do. The more your prospects believe in you and what you recommend, the bigger the chances of them purchasing again.
4. Keep learning. To have sustained success in online marketing, we need to adapt to two things:
A. The changes in the trends of the Internet
B. The changes in the customers’ demands.
To do this, we need to study our environment as relentlessly as we can. Think of it as a guerrilla war where the guys who can use the jungle to their advantage usually win.
Start by tracking every bit of analytics data, every click and sale you make so we have something to measure. The only way to improve is to keep measuring and surpassing previous performances. This may sound complicated but it can really be broken down into a process of asking yourself these three questions:
What worked?
What didn’t work?
How can we address the things that didn’t work?
Asking yourself these questions and keeping things honest by backing up everything with statistics gives you an excellent view of exactly where you and your business are in your campaign. It’s important to give equal emphasis to wins and setbacks. Taking note of wins allows you to replicate successes and taking note of setbacks allows you to re-think your methods and overcome weak points.
There are a lot of other strategies to think about but these are the most essential stuff that shouldn’t be forgotten. If things ever get too complicated, go back to these basic concepts and start finding the right path to success again.
All the best,
Andy Jenkins
Affiliate marketer, does Google hate you?
One question I get asked every so often by fellow Internet marketers is “does Google really hate affiliate marketers?”
I usually ask in return “are you a good one or a bad one?”
Of course, this question ultimately leads to the infamous and proverbial “Google Slap.” If you’re not aware, this is Google’s way of cracking down on advertisers that it perceives to be doing bad practices.
You know you’ve been Google Slapped when your Adwords ads start to drop significantly in quality score, leading to poor ranking performance and more expensive bids. Over a period of time, you’ll notice less and less clicks on your ads, costs getting higher and conversions getting lower. Long story short, you’ll be losing money on the advertising and conversion ends, which won’t be too hard to ignore.
So why is it happening? Does Google really hate affiliate networks and people like you who make money off of them? Is the conspiracy theory that Google thinks of affiliate networks as a threat to Adwords the reason for all this slapping?
The truth is out there, but if you ask me, I’m taking Mother G’s word for it right now: affiliate marketing is just fine with Google.
According to every Google rep I’ve ever talked to, there are three main factors in how ads are judged by the Adwords system. These are:
1. Click-through rates (CTR) – This is Google’s way of determining good ad copy from not-so-good ones through the behavior of searchers. You see, Google doesn’t have the ability to tell whether ad copy is good or bad. It can only tell what’s relevant.
Human behavior is a much more complex thing than any Google algorithm, and there are a lot of times when a seemingly bad ad can outperform a seemingly good one. Nobody knows exactly how this happens. It just does. That’s why I preach A/B and multivariate split testing all the time: it’s our best hope as marketers to see what works and what doesn’t before we commit to a campaign.
Google understands the complexities of humanity and makes it the biggest quality score factor in Adwords by applying the CTR principle. The more an ad is clicked, the higher its quality score gets. If it’s being ignored for a long time, Google assumes that it’s no good and could lay the Slapdown on it. Bottom line; make your ads as creative and compelling as possible so that they get clicked on.
2. Ad text relevance and campaign structure – Google places heavy emphasis on how relevant an ad’s headline and description is to the keyword it targets. The less relevant the ad text is to the target keyword, the lower its quality score gets. This drives up the costs per click and makes it harder for an ad to rank. If this doesn’t discourage an advertiser, the Google Slap could very well be coming.
The rationale on Google’s part is easy to see: it doesn’t want searchers who are looking for cough medicine to click on an ad and end up on a page that sells Viagra. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the target keywords need to be mentioned at least once in the ad text. If that’s not possible due to a large number of target keywords, you can write separate ads that are more suited for the job.
3. Landing Pages – THIS is where I know a lot of Internet marketers, especially those who are trying to generate income with affiliate networks, are at risk for the Google Slap. In past blog posts, I’ve talked about how Google uses a different bot for its paid search results. This is how Google determines the relevance of a destination page to its ad text and target keyword. The landing page is where Internet marketers seize the chance to convert and I’ve seen a lot of creative ways of doing it.
Sadly, some of these “creative” ways of making money reflects poorly on Google’s quality guidelines. Google has nothing against landing pages per se, but it does hate shady and low-quality web pages with a passion. Every so often, Internet marketers stray into gray areas between creative marketing and outright violations of Google’s policies. When that happens, poor performance on Adwords usually follows. Repeated offenses yield the proverbial Slap.
Here’s a quick list of landing page elements that may provoke Google’s ire:
Shallow arbitrage sites – These are sites that were made to display ads and funnel cheap traffic to advertiser websites. These can also be sites that contain one or two reviews about a product and nothing else. This category of sites include the practice of buying domains that contain the product name and the word “review” (e.g. “www.examplereview.com”) to lead readers into false review pages. These sites usually contain a single manufactured review written to endorse the product and not to critique it. As you may guess, the end goal is to sell the product through an affiliate link, which Google finds unethical and deserving of punishment.
- Fraudulent practices and bogus claims – Landing pages that claim you can make a million dollars by laying down on your couch while watching TV fall into this class of shadiness. So do websites that deceive you into giving your contact details so they can spam you or assail you with sales phone calls. Google ad reviewers usually spot these and manually penalize sites that are practicing it. Be careful with your claims. Place them into the realm of the realistic and don’t ever try to con people.
- Malware – If your site infects visitors with spyware or viruses, Google is guaranteed to give you a serious slap. In some cases, an internet marketer may not even know this is the case. It’s normal: sometimes sites get hacked and some bozo plants malicious code on your site’s pages. Your best bet is to use Google Webmaster Tools and check the site diagnostics section. If there’s malware, have your web developer take it down.
- Annoying content – This includes unskippable videos, aggressive pop-ups, splash pages and script that nags users to stay when they try to exit a site. This topic is a little gray, since the subject of annoyance can be very relative. Most of these elements do not automatically trigger penalties, but if enough bad rap is picked up at the Google HQ, you could get in some trouble.
Some marketers will argue that these elements help conversion rates and that’s FINE – I believe them. I’m just saying that there are certain things that Google doesn’t like and you’ll have to decide on a balance between maintaining good conversion rates while staying in Google’s good graces.
RESOURCES: Check Out ANYTHING related to Affiliate Marketing from Jeff Johnson. Jeff is a true “Super Affiliate”, and understand that 95% of affiliate marketing success stems from understanding how to leverage quality of sources of Traffic.
Google NEVER Slaps his offers – and there’s a reason why.
Here’s a link to a free video series he’s currently publishing:
Face Your Fears: Four Challenges That Every Affiliate Marketer Must Face
So you’ve decided to become an affiliate marketer. Well, Cuzin’, while I make things sound so simple in my videos, truth be told even I had my own anthills to climb when I was starting out. A lot of other affiliate marketers will tell you that there are a lot of challenges that people like us will eventually face and need to overcome before calling ourselves successful entrepreneurs.
I’ve come up with a short list of common challenges that every affiliate marketer is bound to face at one time of their career or another. This section is just filled with little nuggets of wisdom that I want to share with everyone, so feel free to look through them and see if you can’t find a good piece of advice or two that might be of use to you someday:
1. Finding your niche – This is usually the first hurdle any affiliate marketer needs to face, especially when they’re starting out. I’ve seen some newbies take on more than they can chew just because they couldn’t zero in on a particular market that they wanted to corner. For instance, if you plan on becoming a supplier in the industrial materials business, it’s going to be tough to compete against all of the long-time, established suppliers out there. In this case, instead of trying cater to the entire industry you can always focus on a particular niche inside it, such as cornering the market for wiring supplies or a specific building material. Once you’ve conquered that particular niche, you can always expand your business and move on to bigger things.
2. Establishing clear goals for your business – What’s important here is that you try to be realistic with both the short term and long term goals that you want to achieve for your business. There’s no point in looking into expanding your business if you still haven’t cornered the small piece of market that you initially started in and stabilized your business. Likewise, making use of short term gimmicks to raise your traffic without any foresight as to how it could affect your site in the long run will end up hurting your business in the end. Try to lay out your plans as realistically as possible and try your best to achieve your goals one step at a time.
3. Drawing traffic to your site – Another common problem even veteran online marketers face sometimes, this isn’t something that can’t be easily solved in a short period of time. Even if you’re able to implement some good SEO practices to buoy your flagging traffic, it will still take a few weeks to see any real results come out of your efforts. What’s important though is that you’re able to implement some good organic methods to draw traffic into your site like obtaining good quality backlinks and creating a strong community of followers that will keep visiting your site.
4. Targeting the right keywords – This is actually comparable to the first challenge, but relies on you being a little more savvy on the technical aspect of your business, specifically keyword analysis. Similar to what I explained earlier, you’ll want to be a little specific when it comes to choosing the right keywords that will best describe your business. Try to focus on a specific niche within your industry that a lot of other competitors haven’t cornered quite yet. You can easily check these keywords through numerous tools like Google Ad Words or Market Samurai so you can see what kind of approach you’ll want to take in terms of getting the best keywords for your business.
Finally, three words to wrap up this discussion: don’t give up. Even I will admit that affiliate marketing is a tough business to get into, especially when you’re starting out. However, if you have the drive to overcome these challenges, you’ll be sure to succeed where others have decided to throw in the towel and just call it quits.
If you have any stories you want to share about how you overcame your own affiliate marketing challenges, feel free to tell us all about it in the comments section below.
Until then,
Andy Jenkins
Make the Most of Your Amazon Affiliate Links This Holiday Season
With the holiday season in full swing, everyone is in a buying mood. This usually means more affiliate link sales across the board. However, if you’re looking for that extra edge and are looking to maximize your profits, then you’re going to need some sort of plan.
Darren Rowse hit the nail on the head when he discussed 5 methods of maximizing your Amazon affiliate link sales this holiday season. In it, he discussed everything from basic tactics such as simply making sure you’re promoting the products and posting Amazon affiliate links:
Okay, this isn’t rocket science, but the best thing about promoting products on Amazon is that it’s one of the best-optimized online retail stores. Amazon are known for testing their design and sales techniques and, as a result, if you get people in the door of Amazon.com, you’re well on the way to getting some commissions.
The cool thing about Amazon is that anything people buy once they’re in the door from your referral link will earn you a commission. So while you might suggest a book or a camera, if they end up buying a ride-on lawn tractor you’ll take a
So drive people to Amazon and let the site do its work.
Another interesting thing he posted is a strategy that worked for him, which involved getting your audiences to visualize their purchases. A move which according to him, caused affiliate sales to spike:
This one is a little from left field, but has worked well for me on two occasions (and I’ll be running it again in the coming days). On each previous occasion I gave my readers a hypothetical sum of money to go and spend on Amazon on cameras.
The challenge was to go and research what cameras they would buy from the Amazon Camera section and then to come back and report on the products they’d buy. The links to the section I suggested they go to were affiliate links (I also made some suggestions on cameras that they might like to look at) and in the days after the post went live commissions spiked.
Readers also loved the challenge—we had hundreds of people come back and share what they’d buy with their hypothetical money!
These suggestions seem to be on the money and will definitely benefit any website looking to drive more affiliate sales. That said, there are countless of ways to grab more of the market with other things such as actively promoting certain products that you actually use (and conveniently providing links to the item after you’ve shown them how awesome it is) or even simply building yourself a top ten list of things you may want to give yourself for the holidays. So go out there and try to rack up more affiliate sales this season, the market is ready and all it’s waiting for is you.
Affiliate marketing 101: Choosing between an independent merchant and an affiliate marketing network
Online affiliate marketing has been around for more than a decade now. It’s a popular income-generating scheme where a content-oriented website promotes a merchant site’s products. With every successful sale, the affiliate site earns a commission that’s usually much more lucrative than what most cost-per-click ads can offer.
One of the most common questions people ask me about affiliate marketing is whether I prefer doing affiliate deals with independent merchants or if I like to go to affiliate network sites, such as Commission Junction and LinkShare, to do my business.
Like a lot of things in life, my response is, “It depends.”
Both models have unique strengths and weaknesses and both have their risks and rewards. I decided to write this post to help out anyone out there who’s having a dilemma of the affiliate type. Let’s get started:
Selling affiliate products from independent merchants
Pros
Perhaps the biggest advantage you can get from selling products directly from an independent affiliate merchant is that you can have a direct business relationship with that merchant.
No barriers! The only thing positioned between the merchant and their customers is you – the affiliate marketer.
And, because you have a direct working relationship with the merchant, there’s the opportunity for you to negotiate your affiliate commission.
Yes, folks, if you manage to create a great business relationship with your merchant, there’s virtually nothing stopping you from negotiating better commission terms with them, especially if you’ve got the bumps to prove your affiliate marketing prowess.
Cons
Selling products from independent merchants is not without its disadvantages. Consolidation is tough, especially if you’re running an affiliate marketing campaign promoting several independent merchants across a wide range of niches.
Tracking affiliate sales, commissions, and other metrics can become a daunting task if you’re promoting several independent affiliate merchants. Also, promoting several merchants at the same time means having to deal with several point persons.
If time is a commodity that you can’t afford to waste, you might want to steer away from promoting affiliate products from multiple independent merchants.
Selling affiliate stuff from affiliate networks
Consolidation is the single biggest reason why a great number of affiliate marketers use affiliate networks.
With an affiliate network, there’s no stopping you from choosing any number of merchants to promote across a wide range of categories. And, no matter how many merchants you choose to promote, everything will be taken care of, so all you need to do is promote and sell.
An affiliate network provides affiliate marketers with a central reporting and tracking system which shows all the data that marketers need for any specific period.
The metrics that affiliate networks provide include:
-Impressions
-Clickthrough rates
-Sales
-Commissions
And, most importantly, affiliate networks take care of providing their affiliates with a wide range of marketing tools they can use on their websites and email marketing campaigns.
Also, with affiliate networks, affiliate marketers enjoy the convenience of receiving a single check for all merchant commissions upon reaching a certain payout threshold.
Some of today’s biggest and most active affiliate networks are CommissionJunction.com, Amazon.com, LinkShare.com, ShareASale.com and Google’s very own Affiliate Network.
So, which of the two should you choose? Independent merchants or affiliate networks? It depends entirely on how you feel about the advantages and disadvantages we’ve pointed out above.
The important thing for you to take away from all this is that you should choose whichever can bring you maximum convenience and profitability. If you are one who is more concerned about business relationships, you probably want to choose to promote independent merchants. But, if it’s convenience and access to hundreds of affiliate programs you’re after, choose affiliate networks.
Let me know your thoughts.
Thoughts About Affiliate Marketing and About Earning with Less Stress
I overheard a conversation recently and I couldn’t help but be simultaneously amused and impressed with it. There was this one guy complaining to his bud that he was working himself to the bone for peanuts, barely enough for rent, food, and everything he needed.
His friend agreed with his sentiment and was wondering where they could find “work where you made money but didn’t need to do much work”.
They sounded so despondent about it that I wanted to approach them and talk to them about affiliate marketing, which is probably the closest thing to what they wanted.
Right about now, some of you are probably going, “huh? Is it really that easy?” Well, the answer is yes and no. There are some aspects of affiliate marketing that do require quite a bit of thought, but hey, it’s significantly less stressful than working yourself to the bone.
Maybe the better question to ask is: What is affiliate marketing and what do I stand to get from it if I do it?
Glad you asked, cuz.
Affiliate marketing is the term used when online merchants or business people do a bit of business sharing. The sharing of profits here is primarily based on either website registrations, traffic, or actual sales. The term is basically derived from the affiliation of the merchants or sales people. Hence the term, affiliate marketing.
As for what you stand to get from it, here are a few of the common gains:
Get a business for free
Ok, before you go nuts and rush to find the first affiliate program you can, hear me out. The “free” part here is this: You help market someone else’s product and you earn from doing that. In this manner, you don’t have to create or purchase a product that you need to sell or market since you’re already marketing someone else’s products. The compensation is commission-based and that means you’ll make money with each converting lead that you send to the merchant’s site.
Fees are almost nonexistent
The great thing about affiliate programs is that they are mostly free to join. How great is that? Think about it: no fees and no investments mean no risks. You get to potentially earn a lot without having to take the chance of losing money if things go south. I bet this is what those two guys I overheard were looking for.
Earn money even while you sleep
The affiliate marketing program practically runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since the Internet doesn’t sleep. For as long as the affiliate program is up, you stand a chance to earn. This means you can sleep, go out on a date, play your favorite games, engage in hobbies, or spend quality time with the family while your affiliate marketing program runs.
Have a business that responds quickly to trends
By trends here, I mean business trends. Affiliate marketing programs come with the option to react accordingly with what’s happening on the business scene of today. A lot of the programs allow marketers to capitalize on what is popular in the current market, since there will always be an affiliate program that is in line with whatever is trending and you can very well get on that train as soon as you want to. Affiliate merchants know these trends and they make sure that it is an offered option.
Get promoted on the most popular sites
Affiliate marketing programs largely get featured on the most popular social media sites and other sites that allow users to share articles, music files, or videos. The advertisement for these programs is prominently displayed, allowing for a good amount of media mileage, so to speak. Anyone who has ever used social media knows how powerful a marketing tool it can be and this happens to be in the affiliate marketing program’s arsenal.
Man, if those two guys could read this, I bet they’d be going “Dude, it’s the answer to our problems! Sweet!” I’m sure you all see how simple it really is. Basically, all that you need to consider is the type of affiliate program you would want to get into. Look at the market, or at least your target market, see what they’re interested in, and find out if there are any affiliate programs that could work.
And get on that boat.
Later.
Andy “Mister Affiliate” Jenkins
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