Affiliate Classroom Blog Archives

Niche Marketing - Think “Reader Loyalty”

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 11:29 am by Anik Singal

Patric Chan has started this new thread of thinking for me with his “Niche Marketing 2.0” product release lately and I realized something…

One of my strong points the last 2 years in my own affiliate marketing business has been my focus on “reader loyalty.” By nature I have never been a HEAVY PPC hitter, sure I know it and do it, but my brain still wraps better around the concept of FREE natural traffic.

> Links
> Word of mouth
> PR
> Social media
> Content
> SEO

…I just seem to “get it” better with those types of traffic.

Well, by default, to build communities you have to be “content focused” and so THAT helped me better understand why my affiliate businesses do so well and grow so organically.

My tip of the day (or week) for your affiliate sites is to GET OUT OF THE “one-off” sale mind-set.

Start thinking even more into Web 2.0 and get creative. You’ll see JUST what I mean VERY soon with a new “dream project site” that I’m getting ready to launch.

I’m going to be using Web 2.0 but in a VERY creative (my own spin) kind of way.

For now, if you haven’t checked these sites out, do it (they’ll help you build communities)…

1. Twitter.com
2. Ning.com
3. Facebook.com
4. Aweber.com (Helps you communicate)
5. More coming soon …

Just take an hour and play around with the sites above, they are not complicated to use and when you “get it” - you’ll really “get it.”

Niche Research Tip - Forget About Keywords For Just A Minute…

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 11:18 am by Anik Singal

Do me a favor, just for a minute, forget about “keyword this and keyword that” and think differently about your niche research. There are so many other quick ways to screen the “activity level” in a niche. Don’t get me wrong, keyword research is still critical when it gets to time to dive into a niche.

But, there are even faster ways to quickly get a 40,000 foot overview of a niche.

I recommend using “communities” to research ideas and also testing to see how the users of a niche value content.

With the new push of “Niche Marketing 2.0” you really want to focus on reader loyalty - not just “one off” sales. Given that, the resource for the day that I recommend you use…

http://www.EzineArticles.com

Why? Because you can instantly see how “active” the content activity is inside a niche. You can also see how many views the top articles are getting.

Go into Ezine Articles and start clicking around in the appropriate categories. Look for the following…

–> How many articles
–> How quickly those articles are getting viewed
–> What are the top authors writing about…

There are even more “stats” I look for, I’ll share more in the future :)

Niche Marketing 2.0 Reviewed

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 4:10 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

As an affiliate marketer myself, I get a little annoyed when a new product or software comes out that claims: “you don’t need your own product to make money online.”  Of course you don’t - that’s what affiliate marketing is all about – selling other people’s products. 

SO at first, I was a little slow to get into Patric Chan’s new Niche Marketing 2.0 package.  But then I realized that Niche Marketing 2.0 really IS different - it focuses on your SITE and NOT on the product. 

So what does it mean to focus on a site?  In the Niche Marketing 2.0 system, it means you don’t learn how to do a big roll-out where you make a bunch of money up front, then the sales taper off, then it all  eventually dies. 

With the Niche Marketing 2.0 system, you develop a site that grows over time.  It continues to make money.  And the amount of money you make continues to grow as the months and years go on.

The three main components of the Niche Marketing 2.0 system include:

  • The Niche 2.0 Dynamic Marketing Site - This is like a full-blown CMS system, except that it’s been kicked up quite a few notches!
  • Niche 2.0 Site Solution Software – This allows you to manage your site online, so you can work from wherever you are, in true super affiliate marketing style.
  • 6 Tele-classes - These train you how to become a “Master” of the six elements of niche marketing. (If you don’t know what the six important elements of Niche Marketing are, Patrick explains it all in his video.

The core of the Niche Marketing 2.0 system is the web site builder.  At first this seemed to be similar to the free Joomla CMS software that I currently use.  But then I discovered there was much more to this system.  It goes way beyond my current simple CMS! And I don’t have to do the technical stuff anymore.

For me, the most interesting components were the Content Contribution and Syndicate options.  I currently do a ton of article marketing in my affiliate marketing business - and now that marketing just became much easier. 

The Content Contribution area of your Niche Marketing 2.0 site actually allows visitors to post real articles on your site (not just post comments, like blogs do).

Next, the Syndicate feature allows others to copy a snippet of code from your site and display it on theirs instantly.  Other webmasters will LOVE this!  No more copy-paste full text from eZine articles, etc.  Plus it all just magically links back to your site.

There’s also an easy “one-click” function that will allow others to share your information with their friends.

Here’s a sample of a Niche 2.0 site (it’s in the middle of the page).

All of those features are included in Component #1 - and there are 7 MORE components included in the package, making this an outstanding value.  The most important thing to remember is all the Components are integrated into a system that’s designed to help you make money as soon as you get your site up.

I can tell you that this is a very powerful system.  I can also see why Patric is only allowing 200 clients to obtain the software.  If everyone had it, there would be just too much TOUGH competition in some of the most popular niche markets.  I recommend that you check out the Niche Marketing 2.0 system now!

 

Affiliate Elite - Just 4.95 for a Limited Time

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 12:59 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Right now, you can use Affiliate Elite to find profitable keywords, and spy on the competition for just $4.95! 

Affiliate Elite is a tool for affiliate marketers that offers more than one way to evaluate the performance of keywords.  With it, keywords can either be evaluated by merchant, or by other affiliates.  This allows you to identify opportunities by looking at what works for your competitors and what doesn’t - even down to the ad copy. 

If you have your own products to promote, you can easily find affiliates who promote similar or competitive products, which is a goldmine to a product owner!

The Affiliate Elite tool is really very easy to use. You just click the dropdown selections on what you would like to do, fill in a few blanks, and the information is returned to you in an exportable format. It is one of those rare products that helps both PPC efforts and personal product sales.

Here are just a few highlights of Affiliate Elite:

“Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote:” What we liked about the Clickbank feature is that it uploades ALL of the Clickbank products so you can quickly scan through them.  Better yet, you can sort by any field you want - Category, Rank, Earnings, Gravity, etc.  It even shows if the product has a recurring factor!  Now you can easily find products in any niche; chose those with the biggest payouts; and continue to increase your monthly income. 

There’s also a special sort function on the right of the screen that makes it even easier to find products based on keywords, web sites, or whatever.  The ability to search by keyword and then sort by any field you want will GREATLY reduce the time you currently spend finding profitable products to market.

Another helpful feature is the ability to click on any of the results and have the sales page pop up in a window below the result list. How cool is that!

Then there is what’s called the spy feature.  Using this feature you can see what keywords your competition is bidding on – and how much they’re paying. We checked our site’s keywords first – just to see how accurate the software was, and then checked our competitors’ sites.  It was a nice surprise to find out that if we increased our bid by just a FEW CENTS, we can jump right over our major competitors!  

Can you see how that could increase your profit potential? You should definitely be able to get more sales – for less!

The “Analyze Adwords Competition” area is where you can see what your competitors’ ads look like.  This is surprisingly useful when writing new ads, or fine-tuning copy to get better results.

If you own a product, you will not be disappointed by the “Find Super Affiliates” feature.  You can add merchant information from three large networks and find out who is marketing their products.  Then you can contact them and ask them to market YOUR product.  Maybe you can even steal them away and have your product marketed exclusively!

Time is money, and Affiliate Elite is a very small investment to make to get back a LOT of your precious time. Test it out today for just $4.95.

 

The Weeks Top Affiliate Marketing News Stories (April 30, 2008)

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 2:11 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Dominating the Search Engines with Social Media Networks - Answers the questions: (1) What’s the advantage of using sites like Blogger, Hubpages, Squidoo and Wordpress.com? (2) Which one do I start with, and (3) is one better than another?

Four Surefire Ways to Write Magnetic Web Content - When you learn how to “write strong, tight, right, and easy, you’ll draft magnetic content that your readers can’t avoid reading.” Here’s how to make them stay on your site longer!

Optimizing Your Images - “According to comScore, Google Images have seen a significant 40% increase in traffic from the previous year.” Find out how to optimize your images for the best chance of getting found through SEO searches.

Viral Marketing : the Real Deal, or Just a Pipedream? - “Viral marketing is a technique that falls into that low risk high reward scenario, but the problem is it can also have a painfully high failure rate.” Here are some ways to minimize failure, and get it right the first time.

 

Learn from Your Competitors Tip #3: Make the Good Great!

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 9:00 am by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Nobody’s perfect - and that includes the super duper Internet marketers. There is always room for improvement, and that means you can cash in by improving your competitor’s campaigns.

Study your competitor’s sites, then improve on them. Pick any of these aspects of their promotions, and see if you can improve them:

  • Look at where they use keywords in text and meta tags.
  • Study the type of content are they using…articles, charts, graphs, reports, etc.
  • Look at their use of graphics.

We all know that Google has changed the rules. “Real sites” - the ones that have high quality content, a privacy policy, a terms of service page, etc. - tend to be given higher quality scores. 

So it just makes sense to search on keywords and dig into the sites that the PPC ads link to. Study and analyze what the super affiliates are doing, learn from them, and then improve on what they’re doing!

Learn from Your Competitors Tip #2: Pretend to be Your Competitor’s Customer!

Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 1:01 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

After you have chosen a product that you know that your competitors are promoting, the next thing you want to know is HOW they are promoting it.

The best way to get the answer is to pretend to be a customer. Go look at your competitor’s ads.

Are your competitors using special punctuation, questions, and shock-value headlines?

Are they using the keyword in the headline? It’s important to see if the ads change depending on the keyword search you do.

Remember, don’t search like a competitor. Search like a customer!

 

Learn from Your Competitors Tip #1: Copy the Answers!

Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 9:00 am by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Look, we’re not in 5th grade anymore, and copying the answers from the biggest competitors in your niche is no longer considered cheating. It just makes good business sense!

Let’s say you want to promote a Clickbank product with PPC in your chosen niche. You want to promote the most profitable product from the best merchant possible, so you need to do a little neighborly research. 

Enter the keywords you plan to bid on into Google Search and then look at the top AdWords ads to see what they are promoting.

If you see the same product or merchant promoted over and over, chances are that merchant pays well and those affiliates are making money!

 

To copy the answers really effectively, it’s best to build a broad keyword list that contains lots of related keywords. Sometimes you’ll be surprised to find that the best performing keywords for a particular product are not the ones you thought they’d be! 

Make sure you do periodical searches and check your competitors regularly.  That way you’ll know when the top promoters stop promoting one product and shift to another.

 

Project Quick Cash: Make Instant Money over the Weekend

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 10:26 am by AC Staff

It’s not often you read an ebook that just about everyone can learn from - from beginners to experienced marketers. But this is definitely one of them. It shows you how you can break into hot niches with relative ease, fatten up your bank account, and even piggy-back on the “guru launches” - and in as little time as a weekend.

The ebook is Alok Jain’s Project Quick Cash, and it delivers everything it promises. Spend just an hour reading it, and you’ll be able to put two, maybe even three of his five cash-generating techniques to work for you right away - and without spending a lot of time or money.

The five separate techniques are explained fully, and in a step-by-step fashion. As long as you understand some of the basics of online marketing, such as getting a domain name and signing up for an affiliate program, you won’t have any trouble following along.

Here’s what another AC Staffer - who’s relatively new to the publisher side - had to say:

“When I hear about some affiliates building 20,000+ keywords, it just sounds intimidating - so much to build, invest in, and manage! But Alok’s techniques describe easy baby steps that also have the huge benefit of generating cash very quickly.

Technique #1: By the time I got to page 20, I was so motivated, I almost put down the book so I could get started! Most valuable tips: what your maximum keyword bid should be, and WHEN you should tweak your ad copy.

Technique #2: No cost out of pocket, except for buying a domain name. Building a blog exactly as Alok recommends takes a bit of time - but not that much! This one’s well within the reach of anyone with a few dollars, and can yield sales fast.

Technique # 3: So easy - just find a subject I’m interested in, and participate in online communities. And it’s fun! Close to zero out of pocket, and it’s such a nice way to monetize something you enjoy or are passionate about.

Technique # 4: A great introduction to AdWords. The approach is very targeted, so it definitely has a higher chance of return. Best advice: start slow and keep budgets low. Plus you get specific suggestions on a daily budget and click bids.

Technique # 5: I love this - make quick money by riding the coat tails of product launches. Even more valuable: Alok shows you how to expand this long term, with higher results. And once you generate some quick money, it builds on itself - so YOU can be the one who is approached to support new product launches!

Alok is a great teacher, too. “I heard of one of these methods before,” said another of our reviewers, “but didn’t understand it well enough to so it. But it was explained so well in Project Quick Cash - I had no idea it was really this simple!”

After reading Project Quick Cash, you will have no doubt that Alok spent $30 on a project that earned him $13,150 in commissions for just 2 hours of work. But what’s even better, you’ll know exactly HOW he did it, so you can copy his success. Check it out here.

The Week’s Top Affiliate Marketing News Stories (April 23, 2008)

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 5:59 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Search Engines Increasingly Important To Video Sites - “The share of traffic referred by Google (up 44%) and Yahoo! (up 13%) to the video category increased for the week ending April 12, 2008 when compared to the same week last year.” “If these trends continue, content creators might want to start thinking about how SEO principles can apply to their titles and descriptions.”

Alexa Introduces New Ranking System : Beyond the Toolbar - Alexa’s new ranking system leaves some people confused - and demoted! Make sure you know where you now stand.

Should Affiliate Marketers Blog? - Most people think blogging is the best thing to come around since sliced cheese! But there are a few things you should consider before you decide whether a blog is the right marketin gtool for you.

7 Proven Strategies to Double or Triple Your Website Conversion Rate Increasing conversions is at the top of every Affiliate Marketers list. Here are seven things you can start doing today to make sure you’re getting the most sales from your current traffic.

On Page Optimization - A Complete Walkthrough - “Getting a good ranking in a search engine hasn’t been the easiest thing for many. Search engines are getting smarter & more intelligent everyday, so now it takes more than just good content to top your competitors.”

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