If you’re tired of the grind when competing against other affiliates in highly competitive, high profit niches, consider your other options as a savvy marketer.
Contrary to what you might think, the affiliate universe extends beyond the big affiliate networks like CJ, Linkshare, ShareASale, and the hundreds of CPA networks out there.
Consider the alternatives:
- Scenario #1: Focus on generating local business leads: A tip – a business who’s savvy enough to use the Google Local Business Center is raising their hands up to say “We understand that the internet can help market my business”. They’re also saying “we’re open to online business promotion ideas” because getting listed is an active opt-in process. Someone in that company has the initiative to submit their business details. If you present your business case well, occurrences like “Turning $200 into $4,000” will be commonplace.
- Scenario #2: Find under-served pockets of high demand: If you keep your eyes open, look at market trends on the television, in the movies, in the supermarkets, in schools, in the office, even in Church, you’ll pick up hints of market trends that are either bubbling to the surface, or are massively under-served, or better still, all of the above. Google Trends is a good starting point to do your research. Once you’ve found a handful of niches, head to the search engines and look for “(keyword) affiliate program” or “(keyword) affiliates”. Besides “affiliates”, the terms “partners”, “associates” and sometimes “distributors” or “representatives” are also used.
What’s shocking is finding niches with (more…)
Almost everyone would have heard of and possibly used a can of WD-40, the all-purpose lubricant, whether it’s to loosen a screw, de-rust a bicycle chain, or if you were in the military, clean the barrel of a M-16. What you might not be aware of is the techniques you can adapt to grow your own business.
Even if you’re a 6- or 7-figure a year affiliate, what’re some of the lessons you might learn from the Nasdaq-listed WDFC?
In many ways, their business model is similar to a PPC affiliates – they’ve got a fat gross profit margin of 48.8% (pretty impressive given their size) with a pre-tax margin of 12%. Their average revenue per employee ranks in at a whopping $1.05 million per employee. Definitely nothing to sniff at.
Here’re the lessons for affiliates:
Lesson #1: The sweet smell of success
The company name: WD-40 – stands for “Water Displacement” and one of the early uses was to protect the outer skin of the Atlas missile from rust and corrosion.
Ready for the lesson? The “40” stands for the 40th formulation that the San Diego aerospace engineers (the term “Rocket Scientists” would be valid here) developed before they had a product that they were satisfied with.
Did your 3rd PPC campaign just crash and burn? Are you ready to give up? Did your 11th PPV buy fail miserably? Ready to throw in the towel?
One of the hallmarks of a successful affiliate marketer is:
- Constantly testing new offers, new traffic sources, finding something which will stick
- Being persistent and not having the expectation that something is going to work the first time you try it (although having some luck sure helps)
Lesson #2: Uncovering the secret formula
Competitors have said that WD-40 contains mineral spirits, which is a common ingredient found in cleaning products.
WD-40 have said as much, that 50% of (more…)
As much as I have enjoyed hosting the Friday Podcast over the past 2-ish years, the combination of:
- the arrival of a new baby
- developing and working on the launch of a couple of new projects
- taking on more gigs that’ll eventually fund a new family home and a second car
means that something has to give, even though I’ve had lots of positive feedback about the podcast series. There’s about 5 to 10 hours of prep and production time that goes into each episode, and it’s very much a labor of love.
The Friday Podcast will be going onto a once a month publishing schedule until more time frees up.
It’ll be coming out the first Friday of each month, starting next month (October).
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In the meantime, be sure to check out my Members Only podcast.
If you haven’t already read Chris Anderson’s seminal book “The Long Tail“, you could be leaving a lot of business and income potential on the table, especially if you’re an affiliate marketer.
The premise in the long tail is that Pareto’s principle (otherwise known as the 80:20 rule) has been skewed due to the variety of choice in the marketplace.
In an interview with the CEO of “digital jukebox” service provider Ecast, it’s mentioned that of the top 10,000 albums available, the number of tracks that sold at least one track a quarter amounted to 98%. Due to the efficiency offered by the Internet, virtually all inventory stocked performs at a high level.
Additionally brick-and-mortar retailers like your Targets and Wal-Marts probably stock an average of 20,000 and 50,000 of the top CDs, DVDs and other merchandise, which comprises the bulk of their transactions. This is known as the “head” of the tapering tail graph (also known as the best seller effect).
In contrast, the “long tail” or potentially 97% of all selections outside the bestsellers (the orange sector in the graph above) can account for 50% of your total potential revenue.
What’re the implication on internet marketing and affiliate marketing? If you’ve ever created content optimized for 4 or 5 keyword phrase for an SEO or bid on such a phrase for a PPC campaign, you’ve harvested long tail traffic.
The “high competition” keyword phrases like “payday loan” and “webhosting” are in the “head”. Unless you have major resources and capital to fight the merchant or the top affiliates head-on, it can be a losing proposition.
Long Tail’s author Chris lists 9 recommendations for leveraging on the long tail which will give you an advantage in growing your business:
#1: More inventory in, or way out
One of the constraints in affiliate marketing are the fixed costs associated with physical products (manufacturing, stocking, shipping) which leads to the single digit affiliate commissions you’d typically see (sometimes at 2% of the sale value or lower).
With “virtual inventory” fast becoming a trend that’s here to stay – think Kindle ebooks, software downloads, screensavers – as an alternate product (with fatter margins) as a way of growing your bottomline.
The ultimate margin grower in areas such as lead generation/CPA marketing, where you’re selling a name/email address to a merchant might be the ultimate “virtual inventory”.
For a list of affiliate networks, check out my affiliate network review.
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#2: Let customers do the work
Sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist, MySpace boasted content numbering in the millions of pages, primarily through the efforts of its community.Their users willingly create postings, write articles, compose playlists, post pictures – generally activities which the search engines like.
Leveraging on visitors to your site whether as blog readers, forum members, article submitters with the ability to publish their content on your site enables you to fatten up your site in terms of content to create a better Google-compliant “user experience”.
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#3: One distribution method doesn’t fit all
Again, choice is king. Some like to (more…)
The shift from a keyword-based marketing approach to a demographic-based approach when it comes to paid traffic campaigns signals a possible shift in maturity/sophistication in traffic generation, and being able to shift with the wave can be highly profitable, if you’re targeting the right group.
With keyword campaigns you have the luxury of creating a 100,000 keyword campaign, sending traffic to it and seeing which sticks. But can you use a similar shotgun type approach when it comes to demographic-based techniques like media buying, PPV and similar ad networks? You could, but it might cost an arm, a leg and your left kidney.
In my opinion, it’s better to adopt a sniper approach when it comes to taking down high value targets finding profit hotspots. Which is where demographic-based site profiling tools like Quantcast come in.
The important criteria I look are include:
- Gender
- Age
- Income
- Education
Other criteria such as kids and race might be useful, depending on the marketing campaign.
Here is where some affiliate trip up, using Quantcast on (more…)
With blogs, forums, social networks having an open architecture to almost anyone being able to join them and start marketing right off the bat, does it mean that Joe Schmoe can be as effective as the most savvy social marketers out there? Maybe not.
It’s just like the movie “Lost in Translation” by auteur Sofia Coppola. Just because you’re in Japan doesn’t make you (more…)
