Category Archives: affiliate marketing

Get The Inside Scoop at Affiliate Summit East 2009

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The next best thing to attending a tradeshow, conference, or seminar is reading blog accounts and writeups about the event, especially if it’s specific to your industry. In this case, I’m refering to Affiliate Summit East, currently taking place in New York City.

Here’s my recommendation for one blog, if you want to read great liveblogging – Lisa Barone’s over at the Outspoken Media blog, covering the ASE sessions she’s attending.

You can catch her sessions here: Lisa Barone ASE09 liveblogging. (she tags her posts correctly, so you can bookmark that page for up-to-date coverate).

What makes a great live blogging session is a combination of factual reporting of the speaker/speakers presentation, plus the blogger’s subjective/objective interpretation of whether their words makes sense. A healthy sense of humor and snark doesn’t hurt either.

The SEO folks seem to live blog their seminars most closely, and affiliate summit coverage hasn’t Continue reading →

Affiliate Marketing Tips #7: Should You Work Harder or Smarter

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It takes effort to build and operate an online business, while some marketers will spend nearly all their working hours focused on building their business, others will be looking at ways to run their business more effectively. The question is whether it’s possible to reduce the number of hours you’re working on your business AND increase profits at the same time?

work harder or smarter

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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In a recent post, Brandon Adcock (AKA MajorBTA) wrote about how he’s reduced the number of hours he’s worked on his business and yet increase his income.

Some of the ways he’s achieved this:

  • Shift his traffic generation to less time intensive methods – specifically to media buying, from search engine optimization before. Media buying is more macro in scope, compared to the resources that SEO typically requires
  • Consolidation to focus on 1-2 verticals vs 4-6 before
  • More focus on his own campaign, compared to a broad “knowing what everyone else is running” approach to competitive intelligence

While it’s worked for Brandon, will it work Continue reading →

Affiliate Marketing Tips #6: Understanding Lead Generation Business Models

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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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money

Knowing how to promote a lead generation (ie CPA) offer effectively means knowing how the advertiser/merchant generates income from the lead offer. By matching the advertisers business model with your own, you have a higher chance of monetizing the traffic and leads you’re generating.

Here’re a couple:

Zip/email submit offers: Typically in the $0.50 – $2 range, these offers require a name and email address or zip code. Some form of bait is usually involved, such as a gas card, gift card, xbox, iphone or other item. Although it sounds like almost any lead will be able to get the prize, do note that they’ll have to complete the offer conditions to receive the prize. This might involve filling in a series of other CPA or pay-per-sale offers.

If you’re familiar with Continue reading →

Affiliate Marketing Tips #5: Understanding Traffic Generation and Opportunity Cost

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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”

Assuming you’re researched a niche, selected an affiliate offer and chosen to either direct link or create a landing page, your next step is to decide on your traffic generation method.

traffic

While some might see this as a toss-up between paid methods vs free methods, I suggest looking at the real costs of “free” traffic.

It doesn’t cost you a dime to write and publish Continue reading →

HasOffers Affiliate Network Software Product Review

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Note: This is a paid product review of the HasOffers affiliate network software.

Owning your own affiliate networks sounds like the perfect gig to many new affiliates – you sign up a couple of merchants/advertisers, find affiliates from blogs and forums, then recruit them, matchmake affiliates to offers and collect the difference. That is, if you can afford the $10,000 or so that it takes to get started on an affiliate tracking platform like DirectTrack.

Unfortunately, things aren’t as simple, especially since there’s a whole lot that goes on behind the scenes than just emailing/calling advertisers/affiliates and signing them up.

Hasoffers

And on the affiliate network platform, there’s a new player on the scene, Adapp (which is a sister company of the Tatto Media affiliate network), which has developed an affiliate network tracking software, HasOffers.

HasOffers has 3 tiers of service, from a free solution to an enterprise grade solution costing $799 per month (as of the time of writing).

At least one affiliate I know, Josh Todd, has built his affiliate network, TriFoxMedia, on the HasOffers platform.

HasOffers Service Offers

Here’re the 3 grades of offers:

  • Free

Up to 250,000 Clicks per Month
Free Subdomain (ie: yournetwork.hasoffers.com)
Chat and Email Support
99.5% SLA guaranteed uptime

  • Pro ($99 per month)

Up to 500,000 Clicks per Month
Access to all features within HasOffers
Custom Application Domain (ie: www.yournetwork.com)
Custom Tracking Domain (ie: yourtracking.com)
Custom Branded Layout
Chat and Email Support plus 5 Phone Tickets
Data Migration of offers, advertisers and affiliates
99.8% SLA guaranteed system uptime

  • Enterprise ($799 per month)

Unlimited Click Volume
Unlimited Access to all features within HasOffers
Unlimited Chat, Email and Phone Support
Advanced Data Migration of Offers, Advertiser and Affiliates
Custom Application Domain
Custom Tracking Domain
Unlimited Storage Space
Custom Branded Layout by our Graphics Team
Dedicated Server Resources for Increased Performance
Increased Storage Limits
99.8% SLA guaranteed system uptime

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Although the 250,000 clicks that the free solution may seem like a lot, you can expect to see your network hit it’s quote pretty quickly, especially if affiliates are promoting offers on social media, PPC, PPV or media buying. A fledgling network with a handful of experienced affiliates would likely hit the clickcap within a week or maybe two.

If you’re new to this, probably the free version is a good option to test drive the platform, and you’ll eventually find yourself upgrading to the professional or enterprise version as your revenue justifies the expenditure.

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So what does HasOffers do?

If you’ve used other affiliate management software, you’ll find the Web-based HasOffers to be an easy software to work with. The software has a distinctly lead generation/CPA-slant to it, so if you’re inclined toward CPA affiliate marketing, this could be an ideal solution.

With a couple of mouse clicks, you’ll be able to Continue reading →

Affiliate Marketing Tips #4: Successful Affiliate Marketing with Convert2Media’s Ruck

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As mentioned before, Convert2Media goes beyond just being just another affiliate network because it’s founders and affiliates take the time to provide guidance (note: this is not the same as handholding) to optimize and refine your affiliate campaigns. To give a boost to newer affiliates, C2M’s head boss Ruck got in front of his webcam last Saturday to answer questions affiliates had sent in.

You can check out the recording from the hour long session: (Note: the volume was increased after a few minutes)

I mailed Ruck a bunch of the most common questions I receive on the blog and he answered all of them during the session.

Some highlights from the session:

  • PPV (pay per view) traffic: The majority of users are targeting on a domain level. If you spend some time thinking through, a keyword-based bidding strategy might work. (Especially since some affiliates are doing $1 million off of that approach)
  • Getting started with PPC (pay per click): Go with Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), Microsoft Adcenter if you’re new. Use features like YSM’s bulk upload and Adcenter’s upload features to save time. Also look at image ads, as the competition is lower in most cases
  • Keep at your campaigns: Unless you’re lucky, most affiliates will lose money on a campaign before it breaks even or turns a profit. Then again 95% of affiliates quit before their campaign becomes profitable. The difference is at C2M, the affiliate managers are ex-affiliates themselves, so they can give you feedback on refining/optimizing your campaigns. (note: you should have worked on your own campaign and brought it as far as you’re able to before talking to your affiliate manager. Going to your AM and asking them to handhold you from start-to-finish is likely to get you yelled at or labelled a “noob” in their books)

Becoming a sucessful affiliate is a process and you need to work your way there. Although you may hear the advice to test 3-5 offers, note that these should be within the same niche (ie: dating, weight loss, biz op). Trying to cross into too many verticals at the same time is likely to burn through your budget.

Focusing on a single vertical and testing/rotating multiple offers within the same vertical will give you a better idea of the performance/behavior of the vertical and move you towards building a proftable campaign.

There’re more coaching sessions scheduled this month and possibly a couple of “spur-of-the-moment” sessions coming up.

In addition, C2M maintains an active coaching forum and the affiliate managers are available for consults over instant messenger.

Their compliance efforts to weed out fraud affiliates also means that new affiliates might have a hard time getting in.

You can check out:

Ruck’s next webinar is scheduled for 8pm CST today (NOW)

You can also check out the Affiliate Marketing Tips series.