Affiliate Classroom Weekly
Read by 35,000 hard working affiliates each week.
Published by Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
Anik Singal, CEO and Founder

AC February Issue Hits ‘The Stands’

In case you missed our trumpet blasts, the new AC magazine issue covering the European market is now available.
Get your copy while it’s hot and start increasing your business today.

EMail Marketing Tips From The Pros

There are lots of really knowledgeable email marketing folks out there. Here’s a few tips from among the best.

MSN ContentAds, The Google Killer?

Has Microsoft finally devised a strategy for effectively competing with Google on its home turf? Find out now.

AOL Takes 1st In Conversion

AOL may not be first in search (a distant fourth by most studies). But where it counts, they deliver the goods. Get the scoop.

Until next time,
Anik Singal

Affiliate Classroom Weekly
Read by 35,000 hard working affiliates each week.
Published by Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
Anik Singal, CEO and Founder

Sneak Preview - February Magazine

In the soon-to-be-released February issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine we’ll be giving you the complete scoop on how to explore affliate opportunities in Europe. This is a very exciting topic because affiliate marketing is heating up in the EU, and there are still many creative niche possibilities.

Of course, with the foreign marketplace growing so fast, marketers are bound to experience some problems. For example, sometimes foreign orders can be risky. A report this week says that the fraud rate can be twice that of native online orders. Check out this blog post for more information.

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

While we’re talking about SEO, did you happen to catch our June 2005 issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine? It offers some some really innovative tips for avoiding duplicate content penalties, and increasing the value of your content at the same time. Highly recommended reading if you’re using private label content on your sites. Get it here:

http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/magazine/june2005.html

One more sneak preview… in the upcoming February issue, Brad Callen will advise you on how to avoid over-optimization penalties.

Got A Question About Email Marketing?

If you have a question about any aspect of email marketing or opt-in list building, maybe we can answer it in the March issue of the Magazine. It’s all about the pitfalls and opportunities of email for affiliates.

Even though we can’t answer every email to the Magazine personally, we WILL try to include as many as possible in future issues. And if you’re an Affiliate Classroom Member you can get personal answers in our private members forum.

Make sure you put “AC MAGAZINE LETTER” in the subject line of your email, and send it to: editor AT affiliateclassroom.com (replace the AT with @).

Speaking Of Email…

We discuss one possible pitfall of email marketing with the recent news about AOL’s whitelist/Goodmail offering:

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/02/10/marketers-debate-value-of-paid-email/

Spring, 2006 promises to be one of the best seasons ever for affiliate marketers. If you’re serious about building an affiliate business, you can still get a no-risk look at our virtual training center, built BY affiliates, FOR affiliates, for just $1. Click here to give it a try!

Until next time,
Anik Singal

Affiliate Classroom Weekly
Read by 35,000 hard working affiliates each week.
Published by Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
Anik Singal, CEO and Founder

Email Marketing - Why You Should Start

Even though an eROI study shows that email “open rates” are down…
http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/02/06/eroi-studies-email-reading/

… last October we told you about another study that showed you how to increase those open rates by mailing on the right day of the week:

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2005/10/25/best-time-to-send-e-mails-the-weekend/

The new eROI study updates the helpful numbers we posted last autumn, but the most important point is this:

Given the volume and other stats, it’s clear email marketing has a lot of life left in it for affiliates who tailor and time their messages properly. We’re advising all our students to add some kind of opt-in component, no matter how simple, to their business model now.

Email Marketing Tips

Want a quick refresher on the basics of opt-in marketing?

If you’re member of the Affiliate Classroom private training center, Step Guides 9 and 29 are a good place to begin. You might want to review all the guides on viral marketing and writing articles, too, since they will help you develop content for your enewsletter quickly.

Private training center members can also review the April 2005 case study with Patric Chan, which is where you can pick up some insider email marketing techniques from a master listbuilder.

In June 2005 we interviewed Ian Traynor, an expert at presenting profitable offers to opt-in lists. Plus for sheer power-list building ideas, you’ll want to listen again to the interview with Michael Nicholas from January 2005. And if you’re not yet a member of Affiliate Classroom, you can check out the the quality of this expert information with our trial offer:

https://www.affiliateclassroom.com/order2.php

For a good quick overview on starting your own opt-in list, this article on the AC site can help:

http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/article_optin_list.php

Remember that search engine traffic can disappear for mysterious reasons. Email marketing makes for a great backup to keep those visitors coming!

Need Content? Special Offer For Our Readers

For those AC readers who may have missed it last October, we reviewed Stefan Everaet’s Niche Content Packages and offered our readers a discount on his service. You can find it on page 24 of the October issue:

http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/magazine_oct2005.php

Private label rights are a great way to acquire pre-written content you can modify for your newsletter. And while there are plenty of private label packages out there, we like Stefan’s service because you can buy single packages or subscribe to his service and get frequent updates on prior packages.

Until next time,
Anik Singal

Affiliate Classroom Weekly
Read by 35,000 hard working affiliates each week.
Published by Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
Anik Singal, CEO and Founder

Quick Tip: Some Unfamiliar Terms Defined

An Affiliate Classroom student recently asked for definitions of some terms in the latest issue of our Magazine. Since many beginner affiliates may not be familiar with terms like “backlinks,” “organic results,” “ping,” or “upsell,” I posted the definitions here:

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/24/some-questions-from-the-magazine/

Affiliate Marketing Product of the Year

Seems like every day a new marketing product hits the streets, doesn’t it? Most are so-so, some are useful. But a rare few are absolutely indispensible tools - especially for beginners who are new to the whole online marketing scene.

So this year our Affiliate Classroom consulting faculty got together with the staff of Affiliate Classroom Magazine to choose a Product of the Year. And I honestly don’t think they could have picked a more worthwhile tool - or a more versatile one.

To read our review of this outstanding piece of software, click here to download your copy of the January issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.

Recent Usability Studies Can Help You Choose Merchants

When it comes to choosing merchants, it’s important to promote programs that are likely to close sales - after all, if your merchant isn’t doing a good job of encouraging purchases, you won’t make any commissions!

On the Affiliate Classroom Magazine section of this blog, we’ve reported on some recent studies that can help you judge whether a merchant is encouraging your visitors to buy… or just confusing and distracting them. Check out these posts:

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/18/youve-only-got-3-seconds/

http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/23/does-your-merchants-site-make-visitors-want-to-buy/

Remember This Case Study?

Those of you who are Affiliate Classroom students may remember a case study we featured in the private training area more than a year ago. We interviewed Stephanie Hetu, who had just fired her boss to be a full time affiliate marketer.

Stephanie went from having a website with no traffic at all to over 40,000 visitors a month - all from search engines. But you may also remember Stephanie’s little “horror story” about her first high traffic success:

“I received tons of traffic very quickly, but that traffic DROPPED dramatically 2 months later. I did not panic because I know already WHY this happened. But this is often what people do. They see a change in their traffic, they panic, and they start to change things on their site. This is the LAST thing to do!”

If you remember, Stephanie had some excellent advice about how to not only correct this situation, but avoid it in the future - all by using the one SEO strategy that will never fail you because it never upsets the search engines. It was great advice, and worth reviewing.

We also revisted Stephanie in June, 2005, to find out about a new strategy she was experimenting with - marketing in a foreign language. For those of you who are bi-lingual, you can learn a lot from Stephanie’s incredible success is this area.

If you’re not a member of Affiliate Classroom, click here because we’re still running our enormously popular Trial Offer.

Coalition Forms to Shine Cold Light of Day on Spyware Cheats

If you’re as incensed as I am at the spyware cheats who hijack your hard-earned commissions, here’s some good news. With funding from Google, Lenovo Group, and Sun Microsystems, Harvard and Oxford Universities have teamed up to fight “badware” - spyware, adware, and parasiteware.

Click here to read all about the organization they’ve created: StopBadware.org.

Until next time,
Anik Singal