Posts Tagged ‘affiliate marketing’
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.
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:
- 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).
- 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 (more…)
Jim Lillig is a colorful character – in the best possible way imaginable.
Having been involved in brick-and-mortar businesses, operating mature entertainment website MrSkin.com, speaking multiple times at Yanik Silver’s highly rated Underground workshop series, operating seafood retailer Lobster Gram, and finally launching his own affiliate network, Offeratti.
It’s hard to imagine Jim as someone able to sit still. He rarely does, and just like the last time he came on the Friday Podcast in January this year, Jim was chatty and gave a number of great tips to both affiliate marketers as well as lessons from launching his own affiliate network.
Here’re some of the topics we talked about:
- 6 months on – lessons learned from launching the Offerati affiliate network
- Combat affiliate fraud – how to work towards “zero fraud” on your affiliate network
- How international affiliates, especially from Asia and Europe can increase their chances of getting accepted by affiliate networks and CPA networks
- How Offerati’s MONKS system improves conversion rates for affiliates and how it works
- Tips for new affiliates launching their first campaigns
- Why and how you can incorporate predictive keywords and demographic targeting into your campaigns
- Plans in the pipeline for Offerati
Check out the podcast below:
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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.
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 (more…)
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:
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:
For a niche like college grants/grant information, the peaks for search volume (more…)
Be careful when selecting domain names because…your domain name may mean something that you’re not aware of.
While surfing through the PepperJam affiliate network‘s list of merchants, I came across an interesting banner:
Because all the letters in the domain name are in lowercase, you’re open to interpret it in a different way.
One way could be “Blind Sex Press”. Leaving one to wonder…what is that?
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Using a series of uppercase characters can help visitors instantly recognize the domain and can help pre-qualify the traffic.
In this case the merchant, Blinds Express, could consider changing their creatives to read BlindsExpress.com, instead of blindsexpress.com.
Affiliates can benefit too, because it will increase the return on their marketing spend.
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Check out my previous post about the launch of the Pepperjam Network (PJN).
Brandon Adcock, better known by his online moniker MajorBTA came on the Friday Podcast to share his insights on starting out and becoming a successful affiliate.
Like successful affiliate Dr Ngo (AKA Charles Ngo), Brandon got his start managing the SEM (search engine marketing) operations for a major retailer and had insight into the workings of traffic and lead generation.
He’s had more than his share of challenges and obstacles along the way to his current level of success and during the Friday Podcast, he talked about:
- How he started promoting credit card affiliate offers and how he dealt with challenges when the programs started imploding
- How he encountered a series of failures when he started promoting weight loss CPA offers and the platform where he managed to hit his first $1,000 day.
- What you should do to research an affiliate/CPA offer before you start promoting it to increase your chances of success
- Advice for new affiliates starting out
There’re quite a few nuggets of information for new and experienced affiliates which you can check out at the link below:
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