“The 8 Things You Wished Your Affiliate Manager Had Told You” Meme

9 Replies

I’ve been tagged by Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director Robyn Martin (and soon to be Mrs Kris Jones) in the latest incarnation of the “8 things about me” meme. Instead of telling you more things beyond what’s already in my bio, I’d like to focus on 8 things I’ve learned about affiliate marketing.

Here are the tag rules:

Here are the tag rules:

  • Each player must post these rules first.
  • Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  • People who are tagged need to write about their eight facts on their blog.
  • At the end of your blog post, choose eight people to get tagged, list their names, and link to them.
  • Don’t forget to contact them telling them they’re tagged. Also, point them to your blog post so they know what to do.

Here’re the my 8 “facts”:

  1. Payouts don’t tell the entire story. If an offer doesn’t convert, even at $150 a lead, it doesn’t do you any good.
  2. The Affiliate marketing big guns are using PPC (PayPerClick) traffic to drive traffic in great volume to their sites. Check out Gauder Chaudry’s PayPerClickFormula and blogs from PPC Super Affiliates like Shoemoney, Amit Mehta, Kris Jones and Geordie Carswell, Andrew Johnson, Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Tip and Aojon’s Affiliate Marketing Blog among others if you want to gain the competitive edge.
  3. Knowledge is going to be your biggest weapon and who you know is going to be a big part of it. I like visiting and more importantly, contributing to forums like the WickedFire Affiliate Marketing and 5Star Affiliate Marketing Forum. Once I get a number of projects off the ground, I plan to get more involved in ABestWeb. If you haven’t listened to ABestWeb founder Haiko De Poel’s “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts on WebmasterRadio from back in 2004 and 2005, you’re missing out.
  4. Join a quality CPA network. Do your homework, check network reputations with other super affiliates. Make sure you have a great affiliate manager supporting you. Besides giving you marketing tips, they can help bump your commissions once you start generating quality leads. I like Copeac (Danielle Iovino), AzoogleAds (Erin Hughes) and MaxBounty (Jessica Dagg). [If you join as part of my affiliate network through my links. Drop me an email and I’ll help you get started].
  5. Internet Marketing is more about “Marketing” than merely the “Internet”/tech side of things. You need to be able to establish rapport, build relationships with merchants, affiliate networks and fellow affiliates. If you’re a prima donna, you get relegated to the “has beens” once your numbers drop. Build bridges, create connections to key players in your market. Do whatever you said you’d promise to do. [Many marketers fail on this point…]
  6. Constantly add value in whatever you do. If you’re looking for the quick fix, or a shortcut to bumping your affiliate revenue, you can probably game one of the sites out there and get a blip on your commissions for the month, but it’s not likely to be long term. Focus on building a long term business and it’ll continue bringing you income even when you’re not tending to it (which was the original intent of starting a business, wasn’t it?)

Ok, I better add 2 personal “bits” to Continue reading →

Seth Godin’s Social Marketing Strategies

2 Replies

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.

In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]

The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)

But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?

It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.

Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?

Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.

seth godin

 Master Marketer Seth Godin

If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:

“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.

Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.

You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.

As Seth skillfully illustrates:

Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.

So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need Continue reading →

Creating Content For Traffic Generation and Profit

8 Replies

An interesting discussion arose over at PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta’s blog: Is it easy to create content, which ultimately drives traffic and generates profits, at an attractive price?

Amit and I are in obvious agreement that niche sites can be very profitable. As Amit notes:

Yes, $1k-$2k/month is fairly typical for the amount of revenue that I generate from my content sites just free traffic. Small compared to what I make from PPC from these site, but it’s a great source of long term revenues & profits, especially if you continue to add content and get backlinks to your site.

That $1k-$2k/month can grow to $1k/day, I know one affiliate who have done this in 6 months by ranking high in Yahoo and MSN.

Certainly, niche sites can provide nice long tail income, especially if you’ve built a critical mass of niche sites.

Amit’s experience of talking to one super affiliate: I had a chance to speak with some other very successful super affiliates. I talked to one guy who was running 500 affiliate offers at one time, making $20-$50/day from each one. WOW!

Is fairly typical of a number of Super Affiliates I’ve worked together with.

But the one limiting factor, especially if you’re not already doing this regularly is:

How do you generate original and more importantly “sticky” content.

Tim notes in the comments to Amit’s post:

Thanks for addressing the issue of content creation. I’m curious to know where you are finding writers who work for $5 a page. Most of the eLance article writers I have seen who actually have a good command of English and write well charge a lot more than $5 a page. Maybe I’m not negotiating enough.

It would be great if you could share your “insider strategies” on quality content control and selecting the right people to outsource to. I’ve found some great people on eLance, but they’re not insanely cheap not do I want to insult them by nickel-and-diming them down to nothing. I think what Amit has said is that if you find someone good, expect to pay them well because they’re in pretty high demand.

–

The reality is that you will get what you pay for. Proven quality costs.

A workaround is to Continue reading →

Wil Reynold’s SEO Strategies To Maximize Revenue and Profit

6 Replies

Affiliate Summit Co-Founder Shawn Collins has been uploading all the presentations from the recent Affiliate Summit East online and one of the standouts is Seer Interactive Wil Reynold’s presentation “SEO Site Critiques” which aims to help you target the right keywords and use SEO best practices.

Wil is founder of Philadelphia-based SEO firm Seer Interactive and he focuses on marketing, SEO and analytics.

affiliate summit east wil reynolds

There’re a number of what I call SEO Snake’s Oil salesmen out there who will claim to help you rank for 1,000 keywords, but Wil has a caveat empor warning for those who might fall prey to these ruses:

wil reynolds

I have been reading of instances in which some dubious SEOs will help you rank for terms like “divorce lawyer outrageous settlement los angeles”. But seriously, what’s the Continue reading →

Friday Podcast Episode 12: Where’s Your Internet Marketing Master Plan?

3 Replies

In this episode of the Friday Podcast, I address a perenial question from new Internet Marketers “I’m doing everything right – submitting articles, blogging, but I ain’t made a single dime! What gives?”

The “Stuck Newbie Internet Marketer” syndrome is more common than you might think and I go into some solutions and workthroughs if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

[display_podcast]

The podcast notes follow (click the “more” prompt)

Continue reading →

WordZe Keyword Research Tool Product Review

7 Replies

Note: This is a paid product review of the WordZe keyword tool developed by Levi from BoogyBonBon.

In the course of your Internet Marketing efforts, you’ll inevitably need to harvest keywords and keyphrases during your site development.

Developing content featuring these keywords helps you rank for these terms in the major search engines, and will ensure that you’re creating content that visitors will find useful and relevant.

Launched in Nov 2006, Levi’s WordZe tool goes beyond just showing search volume alone, it features a number of associated tools too.

wordze.com

Besides the primary keyword research tool, WordZe also features:

  • A misspelling/typo tool
  • A thesaurus
  • A “WordRanking” tool
  • Historical/keyword charting tools

There are a number of instructional Camtasia videos and new search Continue reading →