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Posts Tagged ‘amit-mehta’

Monday Question: Niche Selection 101 – The “Best” Niche

Here’s an intriguing query from Sarah:

I’m a ebay powerseller and getting into the niche marketing vibe.

Judging by the number of high dollar earnings screenshots I’m seeing, I’m planning to go into the internet marketing niche.

I worked hard to build my ebay business and am sure I can replicate the same in internet marketing.

Can you give me any suggestions?

My answer:

That’s the great thing about Internet Marketing, the ability to continually expand your focus and the ebay stats screenshots you sent me were pretty impressive too.

You might like to check out Super Affiliate Amit Mehta’s post “Selecting a niche is everything in affiliate marketing

As an affiliate or a product creator, the biggest constraint you will face is time.

Like it or not, even outsourcing the bulk of your projects, you’ll need to (more…)

Is A BlogRush Syndication Credit Bubble (and Crash) Coming?

On a number of forums and blogs like i am jack’s “The Three Big Problems With BlogRush“, there’s concern that “syndication credits” (the social currency earned and used to drive traffic) in John Reese’s BlogRush network is outpacing the rate at which they can be used. Is there a bubble building?

A bubble can develop when the supply outpaces the supply. For example, if a banana republic cranks their printing presses and floods the market with money, it causes hyper inflation, that burger which cost $5 before, might cost $100 now (due to the drop in the value of money). It leads to a crash in the economy.

There’ve been a number of bubbles in history, from the Tulip bubble (where people speculated in tulips), a run on semiconductors, real estate, and more recently the dotcoms in 2000. Is BR headed for the same?

For one, I hardly think a widget is going to have the same level of social impact as the dotcoms. So please drop the doomsday scenarios already.

Secondly, let’s look at the mechanics of the system.

You earn a “syndication credit” (which you can trade for a reciprocal link display on someone else’s blog).

Each time a blogrush widget is displayed, it (more…)

Monday Question: Do Link Exchanges Work?

I got a question about traffic generation and link exchanges this past week:

Hi Andrew,

I’ve a new site and getting traffic seems to be a challenge.

I have been thinking of link exchanges. I’m hearing different things about them. Do they work?

-Dylan

In my opinion many marketers are overly obsessed with traffic.

Traffic won’t solve your worries if your site has a ‘leaky’ design (with multiple exit links for visitors), doesn’t have effective channels for monetization or list building, or doesn’t have sticky content to get visitors to keep coming back. For the purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you got those areas covered, or are working on them.

Besides raw traffic quantity (number of visitors), you need to monitor and closely refine your traffic quality (how relevant your visitors are). There’s no point to get everyone and his mother over to your site if they don’t fit your site’s demographic.

That’s where alliances are handy.

A link exchange is where two websites or blogs have (more…)

Thousands of Dollars Worth of Affiliate Marketing Training F.REE

In case you’ve missed out on making it to the recent Affiliate Summit East in Miami, the event’s co-founder Shawn Collins has posted the videos up.

Aside from the speech by Ze Frank which I understand had the audience rolling in the aisles, almost every other presentation is available for free.

I’ve watched about half of my buddy Amit Mehta’s Super PPC Affiliate presentation, and am looking forward to checking out the other Super Affiliate session with Jeremy Palmer, Vinny Lingham and Ros Gardner, as well as Wil Reynolds andKris Jones too.

Conservatively if I were to put a value on this material, it’d easily run into the thousands (more…)

What Happens When Merchants Don’t Play By Affiliate Marketing Rules Part 2

This is a follow up to my “What Happens When Merchants Don’t Play By Affiliate Marketing Rules?” post, which I believe affiliate marketers will be keenly interested in.

I called the merchant and talk to them, and what they told me surprised me.

But first, a summary: With a gap in a web service merchant’s affiliate commission payouts on an affiliate network and their in-house program, I was keen to hear what veterans in the affiliate industry had to say. The commission payout through the affiliate network was about 50% higher, compared to the merchant’s in-house program.

Communicating with the merchant was certainly a key point in addressing this issue and some might say the information gap was being unfairly used in this instance:

“That’s retarded. Tell them to retroactively apply the network rate to your in-house sales from the date they started that network rate. If they won’t, dump them..” – Geordie Carswell, RevenueWire EVP.

“I attribute the fault in this to the affiliate manager/team handling your account. It is he or she’s job is to make sure affiliates (super or not) are taken care of. That person should have given you the choice as to which network you promote their program through, or at least told you about both offers. You are a well known affiliate and blogger and you should have been informed of both options. The affiliate marketing managers of Pepperjam are in constant contact with the affiliates who make a difference our programs. We build and form relationships to gain trust. The affiliate manager who was assigned to you did not do that.” – Robyn Martin, Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director.

“Before I began working for LinkConnector Affiliate Network, I was the affiliate manager for a few different companies. I considered it one of my responsibilities to keep our payouts consistent between the in-house program and the network programs. If anything, our in-house program sometimes had a higher payout because no additional fees were involved. I would never have considered that disparity between commissions – that’s just shooting yourself in the foot.” – Jeannine Crooks, LinkConnector.com Affiliate Sales Manager.

“I personally feel strongly that bigger and pro-actively managed programs SHOULD offer 2 versions.
In-house and a good network. TYPICALLY, but not in this case the in-house commissions would be a little higher, possibly longer cookies, etc. to make the in-house option more attractive and offset network costs…a possible scenario hit me that COULD make sense of this situation. Not saying this scenario would make the situation any easier for you to take but…
If the merchant, like many are was clueless and the affiliate program was not being tended to properly and they hired an OPM.” – Linda Buquet, 5Star Affiliate Programs Founder.[See the 5Star discussion thread]

Which is in-line with what I would expect. An in-house program would have lower operating costs and could give out higher payouts, but the opposite scenario is at work here.

And Chickenfeed AKA Millnic Media‘s Jason Bailey chimed in with:

“you got hosed and it is your own fault. This IS the standard practice and fully within the marketers code of ethics. (I can see the shit flying at me already…)…In House programs are notoriously low payers. They are also usually the most poorly managed of the places you can pull a particular offer from. CPA networks have schwacks of experience with a wide variety of offers, merchants and publishers. In house affiliate managers are often the webmaster as well, and quite possibly the night doorman to boot (not always — **dodges shit** –)…

You got hosed. If you were doing well at $60, think how much better you’ll at $90. Hell if the CPA network is offering at $90 on the street and you can push some volume, I’ll bet the can get $95 no sweat. Suck it up. Don’t make that mistake again. Lot at the bright side – You just got a $30 pay bump!..Join all the big networks and shop around. Get them fighting each other for your traffic. You have to be the squeaky wheel to get the big payouts. Logging into CJ to see what is new doesn’t cut it.

And as Share Results Network affiliate manager (more…)

$0.41 Backlinks To Build A High Authority Site? And Internet Marketing Innovation

Super Affiliate Kieron Donoghue has an innovative strategy to get one of his sites ranked within the top results on Google for the highly competitive term “Bingo” and affiliate marketers can take a lesson or two or three from Keiron’s case study.

In “Easy method of gaining quality backlinks and building a database of users” Keiron has bypassed the traditional strategy of asking webmasters for backlinks or a link exchange, in favor of a premium giveaway.

bingo pen offer

The pens costing 20 pence (or about $0.41) each are a viral and guerilla method to gain a backlink.

He’s also engaged in using press releases to distribute his message/content and some viral marketing on forums has occured.

As the marketing is done partially offline (through the delivery of the pens), you’ll get the link love from a backlink, compared to a 2-way link.

At this point, some readers might be thinking “why didn’t I think of that?”

A key reason is many Internet Marketers are overly focused on:

  1. Technology: Trying to signup for some automated bookmarking/viral software that’s just been released.
  2. Following the advice of a guru who’s had a successful campaign (Note: once something has been done successfully once, it’s difficult to repeat it verbatim with the same level of success. Those familiar with Economics will know it as the law of diminishing utility).

Likewise, “value creation” is a buzzword in corporate circles, but to get more out of it requires people to do more than sit in a circle on Friday afternoons, chomping on doughnuts, sipping cappucinos, talking about improving work processes, but never doing anything about it.

I used to conduct entrepreneurship training focused on business building skills in the Singapore schools. It was particularly frustrating to sit in on meetings where it’d take 2 weeks to figure out who’d be a project manager and who’d form the team.

Then they’d be offer to conduct “research” for a couple of weeks and finally decided that there were too many obstacles, so they needed to find some other project (or niche in Internet Marketing speak).

They’d then bang into some other challenges in the midst of their “research” and give that up too.

Which kind of reminds me of what many new Internet Marketers do.

They start out with AdSense publishing, then maybe make a switch to eBay auctions. Then they decide it doesn’t work, and before you know it, they’d made a full circle of adsense publishing, affiliate marketing, product creation, online auctions, PPC arbitrage, CPA marketing, and somehow come to the conclusion that “nothing works”.

Is it due to the “Honeymoon effect“?

Maybe.

And it feels like old ground is being covered, like (more…)