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 Continue reading →

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 Continue reading →

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 Continue reading →

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 Continue reading →

Up to this point, most new affiliate marketers will likely go the PPC (pay per click) or blogging route when starting up your campaigns, what will give your marketing efforts a boost is a pretty simple technique, but one in which many marketer screw up. Here’s some tips to emailing.

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This is a continuing series of “Affiliate Marketing Tips” posts to share marketing and promotion strategies for affiliate marketers. If you’re new to the series, you might like to check out the first in the series “The Industry and Getting Accepted”

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Unless you’re a weird technophobe, you will have an email account, likely at least 5 or 10 of them. So the concept of mass mailing prospect (people who land on your landing page/sales page) in the hopes of converting them into leads or customers will seem pretty intuitive – just send them the offer, then keep sending them the offer every 1-2 days until they opt-in, pass on, or report your email as spam and send you to the Spamhaus blacklist directory.

If you’re already getting very decent ROI from your PPC campaigns, you might wondering why you want to mess around with emailing, especially since it might “lower conversion rates” because of the additional hoop of jumping through an opt-in process.

First off, not every affiliate or CPA campaign will benefit from incorporating an opt-in into the process – you need to look at the campaign and see if it makes sense. Primarily because most of the email/zip submit CPA offers are already opt-in offers themselves (before the lead gets hit with 10-20 pay-per-sale/rebill offers).

Instead of being only offer-focused, think of the Continue reading →

New this month, affiliate network Market Leverage, has launched an  affiliate promotion for its exclusive travel CPA offer.

The Park Royal Cancun travel offer requires the lead’s name and email address to be filled in, which is pretty standard for this type of offer.

To kick off this exclusive offer, Market Leverage is giving away 2 cash bounties to it’s affiliates:

• $1,000 bonus for affiliates generated $0 to $4,999 in total August commissions
• $2,000 bonus for affiliates who generated $5,000 and above in August commissions

Winners are determined by the most leads generated to the travel offer within their tier.

The offer has a payout of $1.65 per lead.

Contest details:

• These contests run from midnight EDT on Sep 1, 2009 to 11:59:59 p.m. EDT on Sep 30, 2009.
• MarketLeverage will announce the winner by 5:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, October 9, 2009.
• There is a limit of 1 entry per Publisher.
• To be eligible to participate in these contests, you must fall into one of the above tiers, be a Publisher on the MarketLeverage network, not be an affiliate network, live and reside in the any of the fifty U.S. states or the District of Columbia, and be 18 years of age or older.

Check out: Market Leverage

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