Posts Tagged ‘amazon’
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.
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 (more…)
Internet marketer Josh Smith who blogs at AffiliateFamous.com, has a unique background, having operated an online retail operation while he was still in school, before dabbling in affiliate marketing in 2006.
In 2007, he divested his retail businesses, taking the plunge into affiliate marketing.
Along with his experience in operating a business, he’s also skilled at copywriting and has done a number of offline promotion campaigns to generate leads for his affiliate marketing efforts.
I invited Josh on the Friday Podcast to talk about his strategies in building up his retail business which sold products on eBay, Liquidation.com, Overstock, Amazon, and even flea markets.
Having to deal with physical inventory has taught him the importance of managing his cashflow and he shares a number of these techinques during the podcast.
He also talks about the business management aspects of starting and growing your online business, together with the related topics of his copywriting influences and various offline promotion campaigns he’s worked on (which he affectionately calls “Chaos Marketing”).
Check out the Friday Podcast:
Links:
I spoke to Amazon Product Manager Zahid Khan at their booth in the halls at the sidelines of Affiliate Summit West.
Internet marketer Steve Schaffer who was also at the booth mentioned that Amazon’s lack of analytics was hampering the efforts of affiliates.
Amazon affiliates will realized that tracking is limited to a maximum of 200 tracking IDs (which need to be created through the affiliate panel), preventing the insertion of tracking IDs.
PPC affiliates or other affiliates which dynanimically insert tracking data within the Sub ID field will find their marketing efforts seriously hampered by this.
The feedback from Zahid was that “affiliates have not requested this”.
What?
I’m not sure if Amazon is seriously listening to this, but I don’t think they are actively soliciting affiliate feedback to enhance their systems. The end result is that a growth in affiliate revenue will benefit the company.
Routinely conducting affiliate polls or focused interviews would seem to (more…)
I was surfing through Amazon and saw an interview with real estate mogul and star of The Apprentice, Donald Trump.
(Left-to-right) Donald Trump and Lee Iacocca
Asked: “Did you really make (former Chrysler CEO and Ford President) Lee Iacocca cry?”
The Donald answered: “No, he made himself cry.”
Another question:
Amazon.com: Was there ever a time when you didn’t think big enough?
Trump: I don’t think so. I always had big plans, even when I was very young. I would build skyscrapers with my building blocks.
And finally:
Amazon.com: You’re critical of the (more…)
If you’ve visited the online retailer Amazon (they’ve gone way beyond books and CDs and DVDs for quite some time), you’d notice their foray into a new area with their “Askville” site.
Askville is a site where users can ask questions and get answers.
It’s a little different from similar sites out there with a “ranking” (level?) system for users, and there’s an opportunity to earn “gold”. Additionally there’s shopping engine features built in with product recommendation.
Do contributors earn commissions or “gold” if readers buy the recommended product?
I’ll need to delve deeper into the site to get the answers.
But since late last year, internet users have been asking, “Is Amazon’s Askville just another Yahoo! Answers”?
Yahoo! Answers is also a community centered around user generated questions and answers, and participants get to vote for the best answer. Being an earlier product, it doesn’t (more…)
Josh Wexelbaum over at ScrappyBusiness Idea Blog mentioned this new service in a recent post “Amazon Mechanical Turk for Fun and Profit” and Internet Marketers can rejoice as some of their outsourcing woes are answered.
Besides your finances, the other major constraint for any Internet marketer is time – there’re only 24 hours in a day.
And Amazon’s new outsourced service boasts a few interesting innovations…
Amazon’s Turk moniker comes from the “Turk” chess playing machine which toured 18th Century Europe, seemingly beating chess players. It was later revealed that a human player hide within the contraption. (Maybe a clever “ghost in the machine” or Ex Deus Machina jibe might be apt…).
So how does the Mechanical Turk differ from the other freelancer services like elance, rentacoder, workaholics et al.
The rates seem (more…)
