Affiliate Classroom Blog Archives

Add An Amazon Store to Your Site - Easy and Profitable

I was recently creating another website when I decided to add some Amazon books to sell from it. It was at this point that I kind of accidentally found about their new aStore — a complete store loaded with items in my niche that I could easily add to my site.

The aStore works almost like a data feed, but is EASY to install. I had almost given up on datafeed programming, because I can never get it right the first time.

However, I do use GoldenCAN because they make it simple; I just add one line of code to my site, and I have a complete store! I’ve remarked on this before because I think it’s just amazing. I’m not a programmer, so I’m all for anything that makes it easy for an affiliate marketer to get content and items onto web pages!

Amazon’s aStore works more or less the same way. You just go into your Amazon Affiliate area and select what kind of products you want displayed at your store. There are quite a few different features to choose from (for example, Customer Reviews, Wish Lists, Categories, etc.). You can even change the colors to match your site, and add your site name.

After you make your choices, you just copy the HTML code, and paste it onto your web page. You now have your complete store.

The great thing about this is that users can review the books, look at images and reviews, as well as get current prices at Amazon – all without leaving your aStore. And, you can have up to 100 aStores per Associate account!

If you’re going to sell Amazon products, you might as well sell a whole store of products that pertain to your particular niche. After all, more choices for the customer increases the chance of a sale.

Just sign in to your Amazon affiliate account and look for the aStore link. You’ll be walked through the entire process and have your niche store up in just a few minutes.

Once in a Lifetime (Commission, That Is)

Whether you are just getting your affiliate marketing business off the ground or you are an experienced pro, you are always seeking new sources of commission income. One type of commission seems almost too good to be true: the “lifetime commission.”

The term “lifetime commission” sounds a little like hitting the lottery. And it is a pretty sweet deal – merchants who offer lifetime commissions to affiliates take the necessary steps to “attach” you permanently to the customers you bring in.

In short, this means that customers who are assigned your affiliate ID and who purchase products from the merchant’s Web site generate commissions for you. And if those customers buy regularly from the merchant, you receive the credit each and every time. The result is an ongoing revenue stream, even if it’s only a trickle, known commonly as residual earnings.

How do merchants enable these lifetime commissions? As opposed to merchants who write cookies for affiliates that last a specific, short period of time – 30 to 90 days, usually, merchants offering lifetime commissions write longer-term cookies that can last two years or even longer.

In the event that a customer’s cookie crumbles due to his or her purchase of a new computer, the merchant generally uses more sophisticated affiliate tracking tools to ensure you get the proper credit for all sales that your customers generate.

This arrangement is definitely good for you as an affiliate. The average customer will usually look at a product several times over a period of time before buying, and this arrangement ensures that you will get the credit when that customer eventually buys.

It’s also good for the merchant who relies heavily on affiliates to get the word out about his or her product. The sweeter the merchant makes the pot for affiliates, the harder those affiliates will work on the merchant’s behalf.

There aren’t that many opportunities for lifetime commissions in affiliate marketing. However, a Google search on “lifetime commissions” will give you several tremendous sources for information on lifetime commissions and the merchants who offer them.

If you’re looking for a particular niche, or a particular program within your selected niche, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to conduct such a search and see what’s possible for you in this area.

Bear two things in mind about lifetime commissions, however. One is practical – the more revenue streams you can generate through your affiliate marketing efforts, whether they are short-term or long-term revenue streams, the more successful you will be as an affiliate marketer.

The other thing to remember about lifetime commissions applies to lifetimes in general as well: The only way for something to last is to cultivate it, putting forth the time and effort required to attract customers, drive them to the merchant’s site, and generate sales for the merchant. If it isn’t successful, it won’t last – period.

Giving Thanks for Affiliate Marketing

A little longer blog post than usual today…

We’re in a funny sort of business. From the inside, affiliate marketing is in its boom phase. Our industry is growing tall and wide and strong. An estimated 30% of shoppers will buy holiday gifts online, and some percentage will click through affiliate links. We’re not just flexing our muscles in the retail sector. We’re power-lifting.

Yet from the outside, affiliate marketing is a misunderstood child still. Amidst our cherished holiday memories are images of distant relatives casting us a suspicious glance and asking “What exactly is it you do for a living?” It’s as vivid as a YouTube vid. You: Keen, animated, sparkling with enthusiasm. Aunt Jane: Polite, wary, skeptical, bored. (Final cut: Auntie’s desperate dive into the punch bowl.)

The disconnect between the way insiders and outsiders perceive affiliate marketing won’t destroy your self worth or your bank account. But funny, it’s hard not to feel rattled when your nearest and dearest assume that you’re in a “fringe” business because they can’t grasp the concept of “cookies.”

So at this most wonderful time of the year, when I become aggressively grumpy at relatives, acquaintances, and all those outsiders who just don’t get it, I reach for the antidote: gratitude.

Instead of trying to explain to the uncomprehending what I do for a living, I tell them why I thank my lucky stars, every single day, for affiliate marketing.

1. I’m thankful that affiliate marketing allows me to work not only from home, but from the road, a bed, or a hospital. People like me, who battle chronic disease, know how painful (literally) it is to hold down a conventional job. So every morning I bless the affiliate marketing industry - it has transformed my life. I earn more, with less physical stress, than I could in a “non-fringe” job.

2. I’m grateful for the freedom to market what I want, to whom I want. You get to choose your industry, your niche, your market. You get to choose which products you want to sell, and which merchants to promote. You even get to change your mind without the threat of getting fired.

3. I’m thankful for the online world, where affiliate marketing was born and lives and thrives. The Internet is still the freest marketplace in the world. The little guy can build an empire without having to beg - and pay off - a dozen different bureaucrats to obtain permission to change the color of the sign above his store.

4. I’m grateful for the people who make me proud to be in the affiliate industry. People like my publisher, Anik Singal, who has devoted most of his career to professionalizing affiliate marketing. Through Affiliate Classroom, Anik is making our industry accessible to ordinary web-loving people like me. I’m also grateful for people like Shawn Collins, Linda Buquet, Jim Kukral, Rosalind Gardner… too many to list, but you all know them. In a world plagued with corrupt CEOs and corporate thieves, these people should be held up as business heroes and role models.

5. I’m thankful that I get to work with so many successful people who are so young. For a mid-lifer like me, these kids are a joy. They’re smart. They’re fast. They don’t care about corporate politics (what’s that?). They don’t need 13 meetings to make decisions. They believe in action. Thank you, thank you.

6. I’m grateful that affiliate marketing is gender, age, color, and limitation-blind. My 73-year-old mother, who retired from retail management a few years ago, is now an affiliate marketer. Sure it’s competitive, and for someone her age, it takes a lot of time and effort to get started. But you can do this if you really want to.

7. I’m thankful for the forward-thinking affiliate networks and management firms. Companies like PepperJam, PartnerCentric, ShareASale, and many others… again, you all know who they are. The people who run these companies believe affiliates should be managed with tact, intelligence, care, and humanity. May their influence increase.

8. I’m grateful for people like Ben Edelman, who works so hard to keep our industry clean of badware. Honest affiliates and networks owe you a debt. Dishonest affiliates and networks should fear you.

9. I’m thankful for the growth in the affiliate industry - and the growing pains. When your rankings tank or your keyword costs bloat, yes, it’s a bad day. But most of us would rather be Seabiscuit’s beat up jockey than a passenger in a small, slow, safe little donkey cart.

Since nine is a nice lucky number, I’ll stop. But I could go on with nine - or nine times nine - more reasons to be thankful for affiliate marketing. Gratitude reminds me that even when those loveable outsiders don’t get it, the people who read this blog understand. You know that affiliate marketing is not just a living. It’s a blessing.

So if you’re the sort who says grace before your Thanksgiving feast, don’t forget to thank your God for affiliate marketing and the people who make it work. And even if you’re not the praying type, take a moment to look inside - deep inside - our industry, and be grateful for how it enriches your life and our online economy.

SEO – Just as Important For Your Blog

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a buzzword that most people associate with websites. However, it’s just as important to optimize your blog!

There are some similarities between the two. But there are some particular things to keep in mind when you decide make your blog search engine friendly.

RSS

Using RSS is key to getting links back to your site from other blogmasters. To encourage link exchange, write good content that they will feel is relevant to their site. A blogmaster will not just link to your site because he or she wants to do you a favor. You have to write something that will benefit their readers.

Because RSS is such an important way to encourage linking, be sure your content’s URL’s are archived and easy to link to. Remember, these will be long-term links. Do not decide to revamp your site someday and rename all of your articles. You’ll lose all of the backlinks you have built up.

Keywords

When you create the categories for your blog, you need to really think about what information people are looking for. Keyword research for blogs is no different than for websites. However, many people just randomly name their categories based on what they are writing about at the time. That is a big mistake. Take a little time and do your keyword research.

Name your categories with popular keywords. That way, when you link your blog to Social Networking sites (like Technorati or del.icio.us), you will be visited more often because you are linked up by popular keywords.

Categories

One more thing about categories. Your navigation structure should be based on keywords, not year/date relevance. If you have a Blogger blog, you can’t do anything about this because they set up categories by month. If you use WordPress, you are in full control of how you name your categories, so take advantage of it.

If you have been doing any of the above things incorrectly, you might decide to take a little time to fix them. However, make sure you do not have a lot of backlinks to a particular page before you rename it. That would be throwing a lot of hard work out the door.

A little blog restructuring now could save you time and frustration in the future. It will help you build up your backlinks and make your blog a place that people come to often for the best information the blog world has to offer!

SEM and SEO, What’s The Difference?

An affiliate marketer’s best friend is the website; it’s the primary means for selling products or services. And if you want to increase your customer base, you need new traffic to it.

So, enhancing your website’s search engine ranking is critical. This is where the acronyms SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — two terms that tend to be mixed together in a sort of alphabet soup — come in.

A search on both terms will result in lists of websites for companies promising to increase the number of hits to your site – for a small fee, of course. One such website offered its services within the content of its title tag: “Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.”

Now, if you’re new to affiliate marketing, SEM and SEO may be confusing. Isn’t the idea behind SEM to optimize your presence on the Internet? Well, yes, and SEO is basically one component of SEM. However, here’s the difference between the two:

- SEM is the general use of marketing methods designed to make a website more visible to Google and other search engines. These methods include paid search methods, such as pay-per-click advertising, as well as SEO.

- SEO, however, is an organic search marketing method used to make a website rank higher.

It’s easy to think of “organic” as costing more money, especially if your only exposure to “organic” is in a boutique grocery. But “organic search” is simply what comes up when you search for a term on a search engine. SEO is a way to make sure your website gets its share of the “free advertising” that the search results can provide, without necessarily having to pay for it.

Now, PPC (pay-per-click) can get your product or service prominently mentioned, if you want to spend the money. Or, you can pursue another SEM method: the link exchange – sort of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” arrangement with another affiliate that requires finding just the right partner.

However, it’s been proven time and time again that if you want to maximize profits from your affiliate marketing, SEO is the way. And the best part is that it’s something you can achieve yourself – without having to dig deep in your wallet!

You need a website and some basic knowledge of HTML – something you should have anyway, right? You also need an understanding of what keywords your customers, real and potential, use when searching online for the kinds of products and information you can provide. Make certain your website revolves around those keywords, and make sure your site works with the search engines.

Sure, it takes some homework to see which specific keywords are used more than others. But it’s part of attempting to understand what your customers need and want, which every good affiliate marketer does already. Without that understanding of your customers, it won’t matter how much you pay for PPC – you’ll have bigger problems than just getting your website noticed!

So, to increase your business as an affiliate marketer, consider other SEM options if you wish to see if they might work for you. But trust me, it’s worth your time to work on SEO.

November AC Magazine Released

The November issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine features our cutest cover ever, plus an overview of the topic of Viral Marketing, including the hottest trends like viral video.

Articles include:

  • Tips and trends in viral marketing for affiliates - how to get started and today’s best practices.
  • How you too can spread the word about your site using viral video to generate buzz and grab free traffic form sites like YouTube.
  • Social Search, a Web 2.0 trend that’s becoming a quick and easy way to generate traffic immediately.

As always, Affiliate Classroom Magazine is free and available as a downloadable PDF in full color or printer-friendly black and white. Click here to download your copy now.

Affiliate Classroom LIVE - Affiliate Manager Boot Camp, January 2007

Affiliate Manager Boot Camp, January 2007Join us on January 24, 2007
(The day after The Affiliate Summit) for a 1 day intensive Affiliate Manager Boot Camp!

Take Your Affiliate Program To The Next Level! Over 6 Expert Speakers…

Only 150 Seats Available - Register Today…


Boot Camp Training Sessions:

Affiliate Communication
Learn the most efficient and effective ways to communicate with your affiliates and keep them engaged and loyal to your brand.

Affiliate Recruitment Tools
We reveal the best tools and software you must have in order to find the biggest super affiliates in your industry - know exactly who promotes your competition!

“He Recruited 3,500 Affiliates In Less Than 30 Days!”
Learn how one of our speakers launched a new CPA network and recruited over 3,500 affiliates in less than 30 days. He reveals his exact strategies!

Tracking Down Super Affiliates
Face it – Super Affiliates are hard to get a hold of. Learn how a super affiliate wants to be approached, right from the mouth of a super affiliate!

Legal Updates – Are You Liable?
Make sure your program is 100% safe and following all the recent legal changes.

 

 

Boot Camp Trainers:
 

 

 

Keith Baxter
CEO
ModernClick, Inc.
Kristopher Jones
CEO – PepperJAM
Jim Lillig
President - Synergy
Clarke Douglas Walton
President
Walton Law Firm
Asif Malik
President, GoldeCAN
Rosalind Gardner
Super Affiliate Handbook

We only have 150 Open Seats - Register Yours Right Away!

Fat Affiliate or Thin Affiliate: Which One Are You?

How much content does your affiliate Web site have?  In the wake of Google’s “cleaning” of AdWords by changing its landing page algorithm, this question could have greater relevance for you.

As Anik stated in his blog posting of July 26, such “cleaning” has led to advertisers who have in the past spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on AdWords essentially being shown the door by Google.  And it means that advertisers wishing to stick with AdWords will have to pony up more money to do so if their Web content is deemed insufficient.

How do you stay in Google’s good graces?  According to Google, you become more of a “fat affiliate” as opposed to a “thin affiliate” – terms coined by Google, of course.  What does this mean?  Let’s start with the definitions:

  • A fat affiliate is an affiliate site that provides sufficient high-quality content to provide a satisfying user experience.
  • A thin affiliate is an affiliate site that contains no real content value and serves only to send Web traffic to a merchant site, to pages containing only affiliate links, or to pages designed primarily to obtain AdSense clicks.

In other words, content distinguishes fat affiliates from thin affiliates, in terms of both quantity and quality. And by content, I’m speaking not just of content that helps persuade your customers to buy your product or service.  I’m also speaking of content that provides informational value to your customers regardless of whether or not they eventually buy your product.

If the content on your site is both informational and persuasive, enabling customers to derive benefit from the start, it will (hopefully) provide that layer of “fat” sought by Google and generate sales for you.

So how do you “fatten up” your site? Different types of content can provide the value that Google in essence is looking for. Examples include:

  • Articles, including product descriptions, reviews, how-tos, advice, and news.
  • Pictures and photos, including diagrams, drawings, charts, illustrations, graphs, and slide shows.
  • Free downloads of digital items, such as reports, freeware, and the like.
  • Links to related sites that include detailed descriptions of what each site has to offer your visitor.

You can never completely discount the thin affiliate approach, however. Many super affiliates have become super affiliates by leveraging sites that Google might consider “too thin” and driving traffic through paid search. And one can run the risk of including too much content, causing information overload and forcing the visitor to leave your site. In a sense, it’s like playing poker – being dealt pocket aces is always a good thing, but it’s what you do with the hand you are dealt that matters more than the hand itself.

Whether you are a fat affiliate or a thin affiliate, however, depends ultimately on the degree to which you want to rely on Google to drive your business. If reliance on Google makes good business sense for you, be sure you know Google’s rules of the game, and be sure to watch the weight of your Web site!

Do You Backup Your Affiliate Websites?

As affiliate marketers, we sometimes develop a very large number of sites, with a lot of pages on each site. So, I feel compelled to warn everyone about the importance of backing up software web files.

A couple of months ago, my computer decided to give me the Black Screen of Death! This is the first time in my history of computing this has happened to me. Fortunately, most of my files were backed up.

However, my program files were not.

So, I had to go out and get the programs again and reload them. It was not a problem in most cases. But I lost XsitePro.

If you use XsitePro, you know that it stores all of its files on your hard drive. It then uploads them to the web when you publish. It’s a very nice system, and works like a charm.

The software also has a handy backup function. With a click of a button, it will create a backup of all of the web pages you have stored in the software. It takes about half a minute to do a full backup (maybe more depending on your file size(s), but it is very quick).

HOWEVER, if you do not do the backup, and you have to reload the program, you will have to manually copy/paste EVERY page from your web site, back into the software. You can not recover them from the original files that are stored on your computer.

You will also have to reload all of your keywords and descriptions again. It took me about a week to recreate four sites, and they are only about 20 pages each! Ugh.

This is one lesson you don’t want to learn the hard way. The only reason to blog about it is this: when I was desperately trying to find out how to get my files back, I ran into many more people that had this problem. Some had thousands of pages to reload.

The answer was always the same: If you do not have the backup that was made by XsitePro, you are out of luck!

So, if you use XsitePro do yourself a big favor and backup your files. It’s easy, just go into the software and click on:

Tools - Backup/Restore – Do Full Backup

It will save your site in backup/recovery format to your hard drive, which I hope you are backing up to an external drive.

You may someday be very glad you do not have to recreate all of your affiliate marketing websites!

Are your Search Results Accurate?

I was surfing the Internet the other night when I ran across one of my affiliate marketing sites in the Google natural results page.  To say that I was horrified would be an understatement!

I thought that I had covered all of my bases when putting my sites together, but this one had a title of _HOME.  That’s not going to help my search results much.  I’m most likely losing out on a lot of affiliate sales.

Fortunately, I did have the description area filled in, so I felt like I had done one thing right at least. 

I use Xsite Pro to build my sites.  There is a little box on the Website Information tab where you are supposed to enter your Title information.

That’s good to know!

If you have not searched for your web site(s) by doing a Google or MSN search to see how your tags are being displayed, you might want to do so.  You could be missing out on a lot of natural search results if your tags are not displaying correctly. 

Here are a few general guidelines to make sure your site’s search results show what you intend: 

  • Each page should target only three keywords. 
  • Your Title Tag should include a combination of those keywords.
  • Use Header 1 and 2 tags (H1 should consist of only one keyword, H2 should be a combination of your three chosen keywords).
  • Make sure to add your keywords to the Alt Image Tags.
  • Make sure your content includes your keywords (I find 10-20% keyword density to be the best, but there is a lot of difference of opinion among SEO experts).  Just don’t put them in so often that it’s obvious or unreadable).

These things may sound simple, but a change in just one of them could mean more traffic for your site.  And that means more sales!

Affiliate Program | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Terms of Use | Earnings Disclaimer | Link To Us