Category Archives: affiliate marketing

WhoIsAndrewWee.com Affiliate Challenge End of Phase 1 Update

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Phase 1 of the WhoIsAndrewWee.com (sponsored by the Market Leverage affiliate network) ended on July 7th with unexpected results.

One of the risks in running a contest that’s specific to only one country (in this case, Singapore), is that you might end up with 0 participants.

affiliate challenge

In this case, due to compliance procedures by the applicants, none of them made it past round 1 to get their campaigns up and running.

So the $175 in gift cards will not be given out this round.

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Phase 2 is ongoing until 7 Aug, with a mini laptop and gift card going out to the winners.

You can check out the contest details.

If you’re a new affiliate, you might find the “Affiliate Marketing Tips” series useful for getting started. I’ll be continuing to add new content to the series each week.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #3: Direct Linking vs Landing Pages

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Now that you’ve conducted your research into your niche, narrowed down some offers, the next stage is deciding whether to direct link to the offer or drive the traffic to your own page. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each approach.

Note: This is a continuing series of affiliate marketing educational posts, if you haven’t yet, you can start at the beginning of the series.

landing page

Direct Linking: Involves linking to the merchant/advertisers page.

I’ve known some new affiliates who literally link to the merchant’s signup page (without going through their affiliate URL). Think about this for a moment, if you’re sending traffic to the offer signup page, and it’s not being tracked to your affiliate account, how’re you going to get paid?

The one key you need to figure out is make sure your affiliate ID is embedded in the URL you’re sending traffic to.

Having said that, some experienced marketers frown on direct linking. The reason being that you:

  • Aren’t fully utilising the traffic you’re generating
  • Not building an asset (an email database/list)

Here’s the arguments:

  1. Not fully utilising traffic: If you’re getting a 1% conversion on leads sent to the list with the one-time exposure to the offer, would a second exposure generate another 1% conversion? Or even a 0.5% conversion? In which case your net profit has gone up by another 50% or 100% (1.5% conversion or 2% conversion compared to the 1% baseline conversion sending them direct).
  2. You’re not building an asset: One of the reasons why the heavy hitters are able to reduce their cost of business is because they’ve built up lists of 100,000 or 200,000 prospects in some niches. Think of the list as your leads or prospects who haven’t found the right affiliate offer yet. There are a couple of additional ingredients you need to make the emailing strategy work (this can be highly profitable and will be covered in more detail in a later session), you need “bait” (an incentive to get them to sign up – a report, a book, a video, a consult session, etc), and you need to keep the list “warm” (you need to keep the list alive by engaging the members, continuing to send them more information, incentives, etc). Sending an occasional alert to the list, telling them to sign up for an affiliate offer is a good way to irritate them, and get them to quit the list, or even worse, hit the “Report as Spam” button on their email provider, and drive your email deliverability rates into the dumps.

With those negative points, why bother direct linking. Here’re some possible Continue reading →

Convert2Media – The Affiliate Network That Cares

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…Although it may not be in the way you are thinking.

One of the most frustrating experiences for affiliates is working with affiliate managers who don’t understand the affiliate industry.

With the turnover prevalent among affiliate managers in the industry, it’s not surprising to have an experienced affiliate manager be suddenly replaced by a brand spanking new affiliate manager who’s just a couple of weeks (or sometimes even months) in the job. I can’t vouch for the training that they’re received, although from the looks of things, I get worried when the affiliate rep has no clue what a SubID is, how a Postback function works, or what an “incent site” is.

If you find yourself assigned one of these managers, you could be in pretty big trouble. Especially if they’re nice (or at least trying to be).

You might have an affiliate manager who IMs you at the start of your day to ask how things are going, and maybe even tell you what they did after they got off work yesterday. In their minds they’re being friendly, or even “nice” to you.

It’s likely to be a deathtrap and probably fatal to your income and earnings, because they’re not helping you become a better (and more proftable) affiliate.

Real advice in my book comes in the form of tips or feedback about a feature you might not be aware of, or even recommending third party services that might be able to help you bring your campaigns to a new level.

In my past experience within and outside of internet marketing, the best advice I’ve received are from people who’re willing to give you the uncensored truth (which usually comes with a painful sting attached), but will ultimately help you become a better person (or affiliate).

It’s hard to find someone who epitomizes the approach than Convert2Media’s Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman.

ruck

Some will read his postings on the affiliate and internet marketing forums and think he’s a total jerk, who probably ought to keep his trap shut. He’s probably been responsible for Continue reading →

WhoIsAndrewWee.com Affiliate Challenge Contest Update

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The launch of the WhoIsAndrewWee.com Affiliate Challenge a couple of weeks back has proven to be quite an attractive proposal for new and experienced affiliates.

With prizes like gift cards and mini laptops on the line, there’s been a long line of applicants to Market Leverage in order to participate in the contest. (Note: for this specific contest, you have to be Singapore-based in order to qualify).

vault

The sticking point has been getting approved – to date, there’s only 1 eligible contestant in the contest.

One of the “risks” in making this contest only for Singapore-based affiliates is that there might be zero participants in the contest – not because there’s no interest, but because international affiliates in general have to take number of additional steps in order to get their affiliate applications approved, compared to their US counterparts (a point I highlighted during my appearance on Missy Ward’s TheSpew Episode “The SpewGirls Go Global” ).

Here are a couple of tips to be successfully approved as an affiliate Continue reading →

Affiliate Marketing Tips 2: Researching Winning Niches and Offers

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If you’ve read through the first part in this series “Affiliate Marketing Tips: The Industry and Getting Accepted“, you’re ready to look at the thousands of affiliate/CPA offers available and do your research on finding a winner.

“Everybody Knows” – Leonard Cohen

So everybody knows the high paying niches – payday loans, credit repair, weight loss, grant information, programs with a continuity/rebilling element to the customer (ie: the “Google” money making CPA offers). But just because you know an offer pays a larger upfront commission, doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to convert it into a winning campaign.

Just looking at the street (standard/baseline) payout doesn’t give you an idea of how well it will do, unless you have the offer conversion data.

Most affiliate networks will list their top offers, like Market Leverage does within their affiliate interface:

market leverage

Picking an offer based on the highest payout is probably one of the worst ways to pick an offer – because there’re many more variables that affect the success of any campaign.

You might also look at the EPC (earnings per 100 clicks), which is in the form of a dollar value. Eg: $0.50 EPC or you might see $50 EPC. That means out of every 100 clicks sent to the offer, the average commission generated is the amount you see.

Take note though, these figures aggregate commissions generated across the network – you’ll have earnings data from PPC marketers, emailers, SEO affiliates, social media affiliates aggregated into a single figure. To have EPC be more useful, you should ask your affiliate manager for the breakdown and look at the average EPC for the type of traffic you’re generating.

As you’re looking at different offers, you might like to shortlist at least 5 to 10 different offers to research.

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Researching Your Niche

Although you might have a rough idea about what your niche is about (dating has something to do with people joining a dating service and the service provider pays you a commission for the lead), you should go a step further to look at the niches in greater detail.

Google News

One good place to start is Google News.

Google has an editorial review team that reviews news sources (including blogs) and includes them in the list of content providers for the Google News service. By checking out news coverage within the last 3 months (perferably within the last year), it’ll give you a sense of how well the niche is doing, and if it’s a niche with affiliate/CPA offers with a short lifespan, how long it’s been in the marketplace.

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Google Trends is a way to graphically see how the niche/offer has been performing over a period of time.

For example:

college grants

For a niche like college grants/grant information, the peaks for search volume Continue reading →

Affiliate Marketing Tips: The Industry and Getting Accepted

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This is the first in a series of educational post about getting started as an affiliate marketer. Whether you’re new to the industry or have some experience under your belt, you should get more tips and strategies to enhance and improve your campaigns.

getting started

What’s Affiliate Marketing and CPA Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a channel or method where advertisers (also known as merchants or product owners) recruit partners to help them:

  • Generate prospective customers OR
  • Pre-sell them on the idea of buying the product OR
  • Getting involved in the sales process themselves

Depending on the advertiser you’re working with, you might be known as an affiliate/affiliate marketer/partner/associate/reseller.

You might be paid on:

  • The number of prospects generated (lead generation) OR
  • The value of products bought (revenue share/pay-per-sale) OR
  • On an ongoing basis receiving regular payments as long as the customer continues the product/service. (continuity/rebilling/subscription)

CPA marketing or Cost-Per-Action marketing is primarily focused on the lead generation aspect of the business. You might receive a $30 payout on a $4.95 trial by the customer. The advertiser is able to recoup their commission payout to you by selling a premium product on the backend (as a product upgrade), or enrol the customer in a monthly subscription.

Hence, for many new affiliates, the CPA route Continue reading →