Archive for November, 2008
Be a Better Affiliate – November AC Magazine
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices Wednesday, 12 November 2008 11:12 2 Comments
“Be a Better Affiliate” is the theme of the November issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine, with articles that focus on ethical principles, time management skills, white hat SEO, and golden rules for building a successful business.
Here are some excerpts from this month’s articles:
From An Affiliate Code of Honor
“How can you write a review of a product if you haven’t bought it?” I usually answer along these lines:
If you go to a Ferrari garage, does all the sales staff in the garage own Ferraris? Or, if you go to a clothing shop, does the sales assistant own every article in the shop? No, they don’t, but they can advise you about the pros and cons of any particular car or garment; and that is what you should do as an affiliate.
When you write a review of a product that you don’t own, stick to the facts. Tell the reader about the author or manufacturer, and tell them what they receive when they purchase. Mention the different sizes or colors. Glean as many facts from the sales page or other reviews and include them in your review. Never pretend you own a product if you don’t.
From Ten Time Management Tips for Affiliates
Tip #2: Set Goals and Tight Deadlines
You are the boss now, but along with the perks come the responsibility. Nobody (meaning you) is going to get anything done unless the boss (yes, you again) is setting goals and deadlines.
Think of your projects as something that you’re outlining for an employee. What should they accomplish? How much time should it take them? When should they show results? Use this as your guideline to get things done.
In fact, challenge yourself to beat the goals and exceed expectations. You probably did that for your last boss – give yourself the same respect.
From White Hat, Black Hat: The Affiliate Dilemma, Solved
Black hat techniques can be practical, but almost always just in the short run. You might be clever enough to use a particular shady technique and make some money. But you run a very high risk of being banned, or at least detected by the program that processes what the spiders find. (Google ain’t dumb, I’m sure we can all agree.) Think about what that means for a minute.
You paid for a domain name and spent a long time and tons of effort (or at least a lot of money getting someone else to) build a website. You did it to make money as an affiliate, a noble goal. But abusing the search engine guidelines in a blatant way can put you out of business in a heartbeat. At the very least, your approach might be counter-productive. You can wind up with a lower rank than you might have otherwise.
From Ten Rules of Successful Affiliate Marketing
Rule #2: Be Honest
Today’s web surfers aren’t naïve. As a matter of fact, they look with a jaded eye very often. They expect dishonesty, so you must provide them with absolute honesty.
- Don’t promote products that you don’t believe in yourself.
- Don’t load your website down with advertisements.
- Do provide honest and accurate content.
Remember that website visitors rarely make a purchase on their first website visit. You have to first convince them to come back again, and you do that by being honest and inspiring their trust.
Want to read more? Download “Be a Better Affiliate,” the November issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine today!
ROI Tips for Affiliate Marketers
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Tracking Tuesday, 11 November 2008 17:36 4 Comments
You hear it over and over again: the most successful online marketers test everything and track everything. So why aren’t you? Tracking ROI isn’t just for affiliates who buy traffic. With a little ingenuity, you can actually track ROI for all types of marketing.
The first step, though, to is be sure you actualy undertand the formula for calculating ROI. Here’s the rough but simple one we use at Affiliate Classroom:
(Gross Affiliate Commissions – Expenses) / Expenses x 100
As you can see, you’re basically:
* Subtracting your expenses from your revenue. That gives you your net profits.
* Diving your net profits by your expenses and multiplying by 100 to turn it into a percentage (that’s what the “x 100″ is for).
Depending on the type of marketing you’re doing, here’s what some typical ROI calculation might look like:
PPC Campaign
($3750 Gross Commissions – $1400 Ad Spend = $ 2350 Net Profits
$ 2350/ $1400 x 100 = 167% ROI
Article Marketing Campaign
$1850 Gross Commissions – $625 Outsource Expense = $1225 Net Profits
$1225 / $625 x 100 = 196% ROI
Email Marketing Campaign
$4875 Gross Commissions – $2150 Campaign Costs = $2725 Net Profits
$2725 / $2150 = 126% ROI
Of course, to calculate ROI you need data – specifically data on your expenses and your conversions. Tracking expenses is relatively simple with PPC, since it’s easy enough to see exactly how much you are spending on ads for every campaign.
But for article marketing, email marketing, and other forms of online marketing (such as blog or forum marketing), it’s vital that you develop a way to measure the cost of intangibles, such as the time you spend writing articles or managing JVs. (Read our article on “Do You Know How Much Your Articles Are Worth?” for ideas on how to track the return on your article marketing.)
To track conversions, the ideal secanrio is to work with merchants who support conversion tracking. These merchants will set up your AdWords or other conversion tracking code on the “thank you” page, making it ultra simple for you.
But realistically, many merchants still don’t support conversion tracking, so you’ll need to use a third party tracking tool. Hypertracker is inexpensive and easy to set up, and if you take advantage of all of its features, it can actually calculate your return on each campaign.
Over and over again, we see affiliates starting new campaigns in new niches without trying to improve the conversions on their existing sites. Yet it’s not that difficult to achieve significant growth in sales, IF you know which links, ads, and campaigns result in the most sales. It usually takes less time to take those under-performing campaigns and remodel them after your winners.
So if you need motivation, simply ask yourself whether you’d like to sell twice as much as you do right now with a minimal amount of additional effort. In most cases it’s much easier to optimize an existing campaign — by tweaking your landing pages, headlines, ad copy, titles, and resource boxes — than to start and test a new campaign from scratch.
Next in this series… update those “aging” sites!
Other posts in this series:
Q4 Affiliate Marketing Checklist
Which Offers to Keep, Which to Dump? 3 Tips for Affiliates
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs Wednesday, 5 November 2008 18:08 4 Comments
Let’s face it, not every product or merchant is a winner. Some products can be “hot” this year but “not so hot” the next. And with the growth of affiliate marketing, new merchants are popping up all the time. Some of them might offer higher commissions, lower minimum payouts, longer cookies, and better affiliate support than your current programs.
So spend some time before the year is over and take a long, hard look at the offers you promote. Here are three tips that will help you make some decisions about products and merchants…
1 – Stop promoting marginal programs. This is basically a version of the 80/20 rule: Spend 80% of your time, money and effort on the 20% of offers that yield the most profit — and drop the rest.
Of course, this “survival of the fittest” philosophy is the golden rule for PPC marketers, since they’re paying for every click. When you’re paying for traffic, it’s only logical to spend more on the traffic that makes you the most money.
But the same rule also holds true if you’re doing article marketing, blog monetization, or opt-in marketing. Your investment may be in site or blog development, outsourced writing, list building, or a combination, but all of these efforts still cost you both time and money. (Read our post “Do You Know What Your Articles Are Worth?” for a way to measure the ROI of article marketing.)
While content and email marketing can be much more forgiving when it comes to ROI, it’s still a fact that some of the offers you promote with these methods will be winners… and others will be underachievers or outright losers. Some programs may offer excellent products, but you suffer leakage through phone orders or parasite affiliates who could be cannibalizing your traffic.
So make it a point to focus on, build up, and expand on those promotions that have proven to pay the best.
2 – Check out the new merchants in your niche. Most affiliates have one or two “winner” affiliate programs that have earned their undying loyalty — and don’t get us wrong, loyalty is a good thing in this business. There’s nothing better than working with a merchant who consistently provides good affiliate support, a dedicated program manager, accurate tracking, and prompt payment.
But when was the last time you researched new affiliate programs in your niche? In many industries, merchants are ready and willing to compete with each other in terms of cookie length and commission percentage. And in some industries, you’ll often find three or more strong merchants with products you can be proud to promote. It’s in your own best interest to investigate these new merchants and test their offers using your chosen marketing method.
3 – Look for complementary offers and test them. No niche market exists in a vacuum. The chances are very good that your current niche audience is probably interested in lots of related products and services.
For example, a responsive audience for “country music MP3 downloads” may also be interested — and willing to buy — everything from country-themed home furnishings to western hats and boots. Why not hunt down and test some programs in those niches as well?
You might also want to take some time to look for resale or reprint rights to products that would appeal to your audience. Purchasing a resale or reprint rights license, and selling this product to your current audience, is a relatively low-risk way to decide whether you’d like to get into product development in the future.
Next in this series… time to analyze that ROI…
The Week’s Top Affiliate Marketing News Stories (November 5, 2008)
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Weekly eNewsletter Wednesday, 5 November 2008 06:21 1 Comment
Commission Junction Celebrates its 10-Year Anniversary
CJ is 10 years old! Commission Junction broke ground as the first network to make performance metrics of advertisers available to all network members, and it’s still going strong. Happy birthday, CJ!
CPA Empire Announces Name Change to Affiliate.com
Talk about a great domain… the name change reflects the growth of CPA Empire into one of the largest and most successful affiliate networks in the industry. Congratulations!
Heather Paulson to be Featured in FeedFront’s “The Women of Affiliate Marketing”
The fourth issue of FeedFront, the official magazine of Affiliate Summit, will feature Heather Paulson in a feature story on “The Women of Affiliate Marketing.” Heather is a seasoned veteran in the industry, founder of Paulson Management Group, Inc., and a consulting faculty member in PPC Classroom.
Blog Rush Shuts Down
A sad day for John Reese, who took a risk on an innovative widget idea, and for all of us who liked BlogRush.
Google AdWords to Tweak Quality Score Metrics
Google seems poised to allow more ads to appear above organic search results, and to make ad position CTR more precise. You can check out the official word on Google AdWords blog.
6 Ways to Put Dormant Domains to Use
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Upkeep Tuesday, 4 November 2008 10:05 8 Comments
Are you a domain collector? Somebody who owns dozens, even hundreds of domain names that you just can’t seem to get around to using? Well, Q4 is a good time to go through those domains and put them to some kind of use — and here’s six ways you can do just that.
1 – Sell them through a brokerage site. If you’ve got domains you simply don’t want, put them up for sale at an easy-to-use domain afternarket site like SnapNames.com or Sedo.com.
2 – Redirect them. Simply redirect the domains you want to keep to one of your existing sites, or even to an affiliate link. Just be sure that the domains are relevant to the site you’re linking to.
3 – Use a revenue share domain parking service. If you think your domains would make good landing pages, try a domain monetization service like DomainSponsor, where you can park your domains, and get content and ads placed on it for free.
Services like this will create and optimize custom landing pages for each of your domains, and include relevant ads and targeted content. You make a percentage of the earnings generated through your domains. Be sure that your domains are a good fit for this type of service, since short, niche-themed domains will probably perform better than longer, keyword-based domains.
4 – Park and monetize the domain yourself. If your web host allows you to add multiple domain names within a single account, you can put a simple page up for each domain. Then you can monetize with a service like Text-Link-Ads.com. Again, the domain name needs to be appropriate for this type of service — this is probably the best choice for longer, keyword-based domains.
5 – Put a blog on the domain and update it automatically. This idea is applicable to both domains you plan to develop later on, or domains you plan to sell. Ideally you should have a plan to keep these blogs updated.
One of the simplest methods is to use a plugin like FeedWordpress, which updates your blog with RSS news feeds. (Note: We do NOT advocate creating spam blogs with this plugin — it’s simply a way to do something constructive with an unused domain, or add news updates to an existing blog). You can also outsource the writing of blog posts to a freelancer on Elance.com or Guru.com.
Once you’ve got 40-50 posts on the site, you can think about adding AdSense or affiliate links. Keep updating both manually and through RSS for a year or more, and you can try selling the site, which leads us to our final tip…
6 – Put a “lightly developed” domain up for sale. Many sites and forums offer website sales services — BuySellWebsite, NamePros.com and the SitePoint Marketplace are some of the most popular. You can also try searching WhoIs records to contact webmasters in your niche to let them know the domain and website are available. Be sure to keep the inquiry brief and to the point.
Next in this series… how to review the products and merchants you’re promoting.
