Affiliate Classroom Blog Archives

Making Money With Joint Ventures

Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 3:58 pm by Matt Van Atta

Joint ventures are business partnerships between two or more parties, usually limited to a single project. Such ventures enable the parties involved to make more money on the project than they could if they pursued that project alone.

Larger-scale ventures of this sort have at times led to mergers among corporations. But you’re just trying to run an affiliate marketing business; not be Donald Trump (at least not yet).

How can joint ventures work for you? Here are two examples:

Got Pancake Batter But No Stove?

Say you’ve found a product within your particular niche that you believe will sell like hotcakes. You’ve joined the merchant’s affiliate program, and you’ve prepared the marketing content to sell the product. Simply add a decent opt-in list and/or a high-traffic website, and turn the crank, right?

Well, what if you haven’t yet built up that opt-in list? Or, what if you just launched your website and haven’t yet attracted significant traffic? Both of these require that you take time to build trust in your target audience through your content, so that they will want more content from you. Without that well-developed target audience, those hotcakes will chill on the griddle.

Another affiliate, whose niche is related to yours, has the opt-in list or high-traffic website that you need. Hence, the joint venture: You give that person a percentage of your commission from product sales in exchange for marketing the product through his/her resources. Plus, a product recommendation from that affiliate can be very effective in selling the product to the affiliate’s target audience.

Well Run Dry?

A joint venture can also help resuscitate a resource that has run dry. Say you have a sizable opt-in list. But the revenue stream from that list is more like an arroyo, dry and lifeless. You may also lack time to produce the newsletters and other revenue-generating content for that list.

A joint venture with an expert both in writing and in your niche can help. Your partner writes content to your opt-in list. In return, he/she receives a percentage of your product sale commissions that his/her content generates. That opt-in list that was lying dormant is now producing for you again.

These examples show how entering into a joint venture can make more money for you than you would as a “lone wolf.” My next post will focus on what you need to enter into and maintain a joint venture.

Be An SEO Scientist

Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 12:13 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine


Has your traffic or conversion ratio changed dramatically? Many would look carefully if one or the other dropped. But, if it rises sharply, you should be equally interested to investigate. You want to know what you did wrong or right, so you can determine what works or what doesn’t.

The first step is to see whether you dropped off the SERPS. If you’re not there, people can’t find you (that way at least).

Next, try to correlate changes in traffic or conversions with any changes made to the site. But keep in mind there’s a time lag involved. You may make a change that isn’t indexed by the search engines for days, or weeks, sometimes longer.

It’s always tough to determine cause and effect when they’re far separated in time. (Ever wonder how humans first figured out what causes pregnancy?) The way to overcome that problem is to keep good data. Keep a detailed change log, and graphs of traffic and conversions. Then you can look for patterns and shift one graph backwards or forwards in time.

(That’s how scientists attempt to identify causes of climate change, for example. It takes decades for temperature changes in the atmosphere to affect the water dozens of meters deep. The time lag gives them useful information — a so-called ‘memory’ of changes.)

The specific changes to look for are usually obvious. Have you started (or ended) a new email campaign that (you hope) drives visitors to the site? Have you changed the look or navigation? Have you changed hosting companies? (That might affect page load speeds or percentage of successful connects.)

Run sample search queries that common sense tells you potential customers seeking you out would. Examine the results. Could you find you? Once you went to the site, do you find what the query result would lead you to suspect? I.e. is what’s on the page relevant to what you were looking for?

Is it attractive and interesting? Would you buy from yourself? A well-known Hollywood casting director once asked an audience of acting hopefuls at a seminar: Would you pay $8 to see you on the screen? Be honest with yourself.

As stage two of your research, you can check more technical measures, like: referring keywords, entry pages, and index counts, etc.

Sometimes the answers will pop out right away; other times, it requires a bit of digging and creative analysis. But the cause-effect relationship is always there. Sometimes the answer is unpleasant. Your potential customers may not be reacting to the changes you made as you’d hoped. But satisfying the market is what selling is all about. Good news or bad, it’s always better to know why.

Free Blog SEO Guides - A Must Have

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 4:40 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

I just found an excellent resource on how to optimize your blog for search engines! It’s the first (free) resource I’ve come across that gives this kind of information for blogs. Most of the SEO articles I’ve read concentrate on websites.

You’ll find a lot of helpful plugins and advice here, so if you are trying to make money using blogs, this resource is highly recommended. Check out the
SEO for WordPress - The Complete Guide

It’s written by Jim Westergren and starts out with these important blogging facts: .

  • There are 55 million blogs out there, if you don’t stand out you will have no chance.
  • The first second of a visitor’s attention is the most crucial.
  • Your main traffic should come to articles and posts inside your blog, not to the home page.
  • Search engine rankings rely heavily upon the quality and quantity of links to your blog when they determine the ranking.
  • The best way to get links is by natural recommendations from other bloggers or web site owners.

    • I am surprised that he’s not charging for this information. It has almost as much information on plugins as I found in the Niche Marketing on Crack eBook.

    If you want easy-to-use plugins that will make your site more Google-friendly, and advice on article writing, you should definitely check out this free guide.

    Take some time and actually do these things. Google is going to punch us sometime soon (I hear it’s going to hurt much more than the previous “slap,”) so you might as well be ready for it!

    Should You be (Keyword) Dense?

    Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 6:40 pm by Matt Van Atta

    The concept of keyword density is less relevant in affiliate marketing than it used to be. Yet some – particularly the keyword density analyzer folks – still care about it and want you to care as well.

    Without a doubt, the right use of keywords – terms entered into a search engine in order to seek information on the web – makes your web page stand out more in a visitor’s search results. The processes used to determine search results have changed greatly. But the purpose of keywords to affiliate marketers has not changed.

    Keyword density is a ratio of the number of times a keyword appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on that page. For example, a web page with 1,000 words of content and 10 keyword appearances has a density of 1% for that keyword. (10/1000 x 100%)

    Back in the day, keyword density was considered a good thing in creating SEO-enhanced web pages. But it’s now considered more for its negatives than for its positives.

    Ever attended a party that was fun at first, but a rude guest spoiled it for everyone else? Keyword density became such a party. Spammers optimized their web pages through “keyword stuffing,” or loading a page with keywords, to maximize search engine ranking – even if the resulting page content made no sense.

    Justifiably, search engines labeled this practice unethical and set limits on keyword density levels. Adjusting to these limits, however, the spammers continued their onslaught. These events changed how search engines treat keyword density.

    Keyword density today is a balancing act. Insert too few keyword appearances on a page, and search engines will label your page as irrelevant. Insert too many, and search engines will label your page as spam. Either way, you won’t find your page in the search results without another search to narrow those results.

    So, when creating website content, where’s the happy medium? The answer is, don’t worry about it. Simply do the following and keyword density won’t become an issue:

    • Focus on writing useful content for your target audience. Insert the keywords, of course, but make sure they flow naturally within the content. Do not force keywords into your content just to include them.

    • Position your keywords not just in the specific page content, but also in the title tags and header tags.

    • Make sure your keywords relate well to the niche to which you are marketing.


    The proper balance will happen more or less automatically.

    Video Ads, Wave of the (Not So Distant) Future

    Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 5:53 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

    Video ads are definitely harder to produce than other types. But recent data suggests the struggle may well be worth the effort. According to eMarketer, online video ads get between four and seven times the clickthrough rate of static visuals. Though both figures are low (0.4%-0.74% and 0.1%, respectively), the difference is striking.

    Video ads can pump through a lot of information quickly in an entertaining style. The combination of eye candy and useful fact can be unbeatable. Showing an HDTV ad in photo form is a very limiting way of conveying the value of the higher resolution screen. Move the subject to something even more dynamic, such as bicycles or cars, and the potential effectiveness of the two modes becomes obvious.

    On top of the visual advantages, video offers sound. You can limit your choice to some music and hope your audience likes what you’ve picked. Or, you can expand the options to include voice over that describes something your audience wants to know about the product.

    And, don’t forget, more and more people these days read less and less. True, blogs are ever more popular. But the information passed is in small chunks, quick and easy to digest. They may not have the time or interest to read a whole page of copy. But those same potential customers will often multi-task and listen to and (half) watch a video, while they read email or surf.

    Video ads are becoming longer, too. And, surprisingly, studies suggest that viewers are not turning them off, but often watch to the end. That means more than the traditional 30 seconds to put your message across.

    With the market for video ads projected to continue to rise for the next few years, and with broadband becoming more ubiquitous, it will soon become the dominant method. Producing a video isn’t as difficult as it may seem to the uninitiated. Inexpensive equipment has made it an option for most.

    All it takes is some time to research and a bit of an adventurous spirit to try something creatively new. But those attributes are in abundance in the affiliate marketing world.

    eComXpo Starts Tomorrow - Here’s Your Free Ticket!

    Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 4:29 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

    I’m such an Internet Marketing geek! I attended a marketing conference in Dallas this weekend without even having to go to Dallas!

    I watched it via a video stream direct to my computer. The one big thing I missed though, was being able to talk to the presenters and other people at the conference.

    eComXpo doesn’t have this problem. We know that because the Affiliate Classroom has had a “booth” at this excellent ONLINE trade show several times. It’s virtual reality at it’s best! You can attend from your computer, and actually visit (via email or chat) with the people staffing the booths. I’ll be there, along with other Affiliate Classroom staff, to answer questions and chat with anyone who stops by.

    eComXpo starts tomomrrow, and runs through Thursday, March 22nd. Use this link and Affiliate Classroom can get you in for free!

    Here are some of the benefits of attending an online Tradeshow:

    • 100% Online and Virtual
    • FREE to Attend
    • Has All the Benefits of a Top Tradeshow
    • There will be more than 7,000 Attendees, 300 Exhibitors and 40 Presenters
    • View 175 Archived Presentations at eComXpo University
    • They are expecting over 8,000 attendees!

    It seems like eComXpo grows by about 1,000 attendees every time they host the show, so obviously it’s a great show! If you’ve ever attended, we’ll see you there!

    You only need to attend once to know that you would NOT miss this opportunity. And if you’ve never attended, you should - it’s THE best way to see the ENTIRE affiliate industry from one place.

    The way it works is that as soon as the show opens tomorrow, you simply log-in using your free login (courtesy of Affiliate Classroom).

    At that point, of course, the first booth you should visit is OURS! Then, after that you can visit any of over 300 exhibitors! These are all companies in the affiliate or search marketing world; you never know what connections you will make! Be sure to take note about the start times of the Presentations. There is a great line-up of speakers, as usual.

    Find out what all the excitement is about. Register for free and plan to spend some time the next few days learning about all the companies and new things going on in the world of affiliate marketing.

    March Issue Affiliate Classroom Available

    Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 6:30 pm by Helen Montgomery, AC Magazine

    [Editor’s Note: I confess to some bias, but I thought this was worth posting more than once. Thanks, everybody! Jeff Perren]

    Optimized copy is the theme of the March 2007 issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.

    Cover Story

    SEO With Real People in Mind: Writing for both potential buyers and search engine spiders.

    Keyword Rich Copy, the Key to Riches: A step-by-step lesson on how to write keyworded copy.

    Affiliate Pre-Sales Checklist: Writing how-tos covering PPC ads to product reviews.

    Use the Copywriting Methods of the Pros: How to incorporate the secrets of million dollar copywriters.

    Remember, you can also brand the magazine with your affiliate links and give it away on your site. AC pays monthly commission on two tiers, so it’s easy to generate recurring income with our program! Click here to sign up as an affiliate and get the branding kit:

    Download the March 2007 Issue of AC Magazine now.

    Cloaking, Good and Evil Explained

    Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 3:45 pm by Matt Van Atta

    Intrigue and espionage play a role in Internet activity, including affiliate marketing.

    It may not exactly be James Bond trying to get the goods on the the bad guy. (Although when I saw the movie “Casino Royale,” I couldn’t help but notice 007’s deftness with the laptop.) But, the world does have white-hatted good guys and black-hatted bad guys. Always has, always will. The Internet does nothing to change that. It merely provides another venue for the classic good-versus-evil struggle.

    So what does that have to do with marketing?

    Enter: cloaking. The dictionary definition is “to cover or hide with.” In the Internet context, cloaking prevents content or HTML code associated with a web page from being accessible to visitors. The term contains both bad and good connotations – sort of a double-edged sword.

    Cloaking’s “evil” edge pertains to search engines. Those on “the dark side” can program their web server so that ordinary visitors see one kind of page content, but Google and other search engines receive entirely different content. These bad guys thus can distort search engine results to their advantage, lure unsuspecting web visitors into their traps, and take somebody else’s commission – possibly yours.

    Cloaking techniques prevent Google from accurately providing legitimate search results. That’s why Google bans sites it catches using cloaking. If your marketing efforts involve Google, it’s best not to try this.

    Now let’s focus on the “good” edge of the cloaking sword: link cloaking.

    Take the affiliate links on your website. They contain your unique affiliate ID, given to you by the merchant and enabling you to be paid on sales emanating from them. But the resulting URL can be long and complicated.

    Some customers will copy and paste only the first part of the URL into their browsers (leaving out your affiliate ID). Dishonorable affiliate marketers can substitute their ID for yours and receive credit for the product’s purchase. Either way, you lose commissions.

    But cloaking script helps by disguising the affiliate link. It replaces the original URL with a redirected URL that is streamlined and protects your affiliate ID. Many merchants provide cloaked URLs as part of their affiliate arrangements. Some websites (including EHosting4U.com, recommended by Affiliate Classroom) offer free or low-cost link cloaking options.

    Search engine cloaking is unmitigated deception. But link cloaking is simply an act of self-defense – protecting you and your hard-earned commissions from the clutches of the dark side.

    Laundering Your Web Code

    Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 8:37 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

    There seems to be a few differences of opinion on whether the code in the back-end of web-pages needs to be squeaky clean.

    If you use Microsoft Word or FrontPage (like I do) to write your blog posts, you know that a lot of garbage is carried over when you copy and paste this information into your post.

    In fact, there is so much extra code in some cases that when you paste it into Wordpress, it becomes a terrible mess! Cleaning up this code can take a lot of time - but is it worth it?

    I read one report that said crawlers only read 150-250 words of a page, so if those words are filled with extra code, the crawler may not find the information you intended to be indexed. That being said, it seems like it would be beneficial to have less code in the back-end of your pages.

    But not so fast!

    WebProNews did an interview on this subject with Google’s own Vanessa Fox, in a nutshell, here’s her statement:

    Code to text ratio!

    This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say - it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.

    The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio.

    So, was all that time I spent cleaning up my code wasted? My opinion; I don’t think so.

    While Google currently accepts the dirty code that is input with some word processing software, I do not.

    Cleaning up the code makes it a LOT easier to make updates in the future. Plus, we all know how Google likes to make changes. I’m not going to be the one that has to go through hundreds of web-pages and try to clean them up if Google ever changes their mind. I’d much rather do it “right” the first time!

    What’s So Great About Email Marketing

    Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 4:13 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

    Notice, there’s no question mark in the title. That’s because, for me, there’s no question about it.

    Everyone who has tried it knows all about the continual and continuing challenges entailed in email marketing. Getting a high percentage of delivery is still a high hurdle. Avoiding the spam filter is part of that. Then there’s the eternal dilemma: to target or shotgun.

    Sure, it’s easy to go on all day about all the tough aspects of email marketing. But there are advantages that make it the perfect channel for certain personality types.

    Face it, some people just aren’t website designers. If you look at many sites, you’ll see that the layout is poor. Navigation is non-existent. Finding products is tough for customers and buying them even tougher. All that isn’t necessarily a criticism of the designers; those things are very hard to do well and not everyone has the cash to pay to outsource.

    None of those problems loom large in email marketing, though. With this direct form of contact — once you get into the Inbox and opened — you can easily present your product. No navigation involved; the reader just reads some text and clicks a link. No finding the product or descriptions; it’s all right there in front of him or her.

    And, one of my favorite aspects:.it’s an active enterprise. Affiliate marketers make huge, and often ingenious, efforts to draw traffic to a site. With email, you go to the customer, you don’t have to get them to come to you. Of course, there’s still that little problem of getting the message to them and read. But, still, you’re reaching out, not waiting for them to come to you.

    It can be frustrating to design the best website possible, buy PPC or acquire links, and then hope they show up. But with email marketing, you can stay busy for a long time building a list, writing copy, and delivering messages. There’s a direct ratio between your efforts and the reward that is sometimes missing in other channels.

    Targeting

    One of the first things to consider is targeting your audience.

    However you acquired your list, not every message is for every recipient. Find out as much as you can about your potential reader and write for him or her. Even the same product can, and should, be sold differently depending on age, gender, hobby or interests, and a dozen other important variables.

    The more you know, the better you can target.

    Email marketing is not a complete strategy for most marketers. But as one leg of a powerful platform, it’s a dynamic way to reach out. Devote at least 25% of your efforts to this channel and you’re likely to reap more than 25% of your revenue this way.

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