Archive for March, 2007
Making Money With Joint Ventures
Posted by Matt Van Atta in Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices, Traffic Friday, 30 March 2007 15:58 No Comments
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
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Marketing, SEO Thursday, 29 March 2007 12:13 No Comments
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
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing, Free Traffic, SEO Tuesday, 27 March 2007 16:40 1 Comment
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?
Posted by Matt Van Atta in Affiliate Marketing, Content Creation Friday, 23 March 2007 18:40 2 Comments
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
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Marketing, Web 2.0 Marketing Thursday, 22 March 2007 17:53 3 Comments
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.
