Affiliate Marketing
eBay gives Commission Junction the boot - Launches it’s own Partner Network
In case you haven’t heard, eBay has launched it’s own Partner Network and will be leaving Commission Junction. If you’re an eBay affiliate you have until May 1st, 2008 to migrate all your links to the eBay Partner Network with new eBay identifiers. eBay has also announced a 5% bonus for all affiliate traffic through April 2008, so the sooner you migrate the more money you can make.
To get started:
- Register with eBay Partner Network on April 1, 2008
- Confirm your registration, and obtain your new identifiers
- Update your links with your new identifiers
- Complete migration by May 1, 2008 deadline
For more details, visit the announcement at eBay’s Affiliate Blog here
Small Sites, Big Money eBook Review
If you’re still wondering how to make your first dollar online amidst a sea of mutli-million dollar websites and giants, then Small Sites, Big Money might be a step in the right direction for you.
Matt Coddington - the author of this ebook runs a blog at mattcoddington.com, but he’s gained a bit of internet notoriety when he built and sold netbusinessblog.com for $13k in less than five months. Netbusinessblog.com’s focus prior to the sale was on building small niche sites, so it comes as no surprise when Matt decided to release this eBook on building niche sites - Small Sites, Big Money.
Small Sites, Big Money contains a lot of useful information. Matt walks you through building a niche site in the following steps:
- Finding & Researching a Niche
- Monetization
- Website Development
- Search Engine Optimization
The ebook clocks in just under 31 pages, which some people might consider somewhat short - but those pages are filled with solid information. I also own a few niche sites and I was able to pick a lot of useful tips and pointers - so there’s something in this ebook for everyone.
There were a few things that I didn’t like about the ebook - but the main problems I have are not with the content but rather with the layout. The layout could have been structured a little better with clear categories and sections. There are no chapters for example, Pros and Cons are bunched together (would have been better if they were in numbered lists), headers and footers would have been useful to help keep track of what sections you were currently reading. The ebook might seem rushed to some - but again don’t let that fool you because there is a lot of good content. The additional resources section is almost non-existent
Even though Small Sites, Big Money might seem a bit expensive to some at $40 - there’s an affiliate program and I guess the price accounts for sales commissions, and there are some really good gems in here, especially the section “Scope out your Competition.”
To purchase or for more information, visit the Small Sites, Big Money website here.
Aaron Patzer is an example of the Ultimate Affiliate Marketer
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Thanks for visiting!I came across a post today at Techcrunch announcing that Mint, an online service that helps [...]
Creating a Long-term Cash Cow with the Rocket Profit Affiliate Network
Originally, the title of this post was either going to be something like “The Killer Guide to Making Money Online with the Rocket Profit Affiliate Network”, or “The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online with a Rocket Profit Affiliate Program.”
Then I realized that no way truly is the best, the best is whatever works for you depending on your situation.
Landing site or Landing Page?
Most affiliates will go for the fast buck and create a landing page for their offer. You can make money - but conversion rates may be low (you’re only getting ppc traffic), which means you’ll have to spend a lot of money upfront to turn a profit. Secondly, if the offer gets pulled from the affiliate network (this happens more than you might think) - what are you going to do?
I prefer to build a viable online business in the form of a landing site around a product or offer. I can start with no money at all, I don’t have to worry about offers being pulled (you can just substitute another related product), I get my own website in the process - and in the end I can sell the whole operation for 100x my initial investment. It takes longer, but in the long term it pays off more and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this by picking an offer from a hot, new affiliate network - Rocket Profit.
Rocket Profit
First of all, let me just say that Rocket Profit has to be the MOST exciting affiliate network that I belong to right now (and I belong to a ton of networks). Rocket Profit has a lot of great offers, and more especially some really juicy, exclusive offers. The people behind Rocket Profit really know their stuff. There’s a lot to like about the network - for example the parent company is traded on the Nasdaq so that should tell you there’s nothing shady about the company - but 2 of the most important things that should matter to you as an affiliate are:
- Payment - how fast and what’s the minimum payout level?
- Communication
Rocket Profit offers super fast commissions which is extremely important and better yet they have a low payout level, $25. I belong to some affiliate networks where you don’t get paid for months (credit card affiliate programs are notorious for this) and others where you have to earn at least a $100 before you get paid (Adsense anybody?). Better yet, Rocket Profit sends payment by Paypal without any extra fees! See Rocket Profit’s payment options here, click on FAQ.
Secondly, I haven’t seen a more pro-communication network than Rocket Profit. They have 24/7 customer service, and when you login - your affiliate manager information is displayed prominently on the top right of your user panel. Which brings me to my first step towards creating your long term cash cow …
Know your Affiliate Manager
This factor is often overlooked by a majority of affiliates. Upon joining a new network - most just look through the available offers and pick the offer with the highest payout. I used to be guilty of doing this. What you might not realize is that sometimes the offers with the highest payouts are the hardest to convert - that’s why they pay so high! Unless you are a super affiliate, stay away from those kinds of offers. Now, I always make it a point to introduce myself to my affiliate manager for two major reasons:
- Your affiliate manager will tell you what the hottest offers are
- Your affiliate manager can provide you with conversion rates and eCPC - essential if you are going to be run a PPC campaign
Choose an Offer
So after introducing yourself to your affiliate manager, the next step is to pick an offer. You can take your affiliate managers advice and pick a hot offer - or you can pick your own offer. The two main criteria I use to pick offers are:
- Exclusivity - why market something thousands of other affiliate marketers are promoting the same thing? I want something nobody else has and I like to get in early. Plus common offers means a lot of competition - which in turn means my keywords might cost me more in a PPC campaign
- Promote something I’m interested in - I’m in this for the long haul, and I’m going to put in the hours. I pick something I would enjoy telling my best friend about. If I really don’t care about a product or offer - my campaign will turn out sloppy.
The offer I decided to pick is Shaq’s Big Family Challenge. It’s in a very hot niche - weight loss. It’s a family oriented activity which is excellent because it opens up avenues for cross selling opportunities to everyone in the family, and best of all, it’s associated with one of the most famous athletes on the planet, Shaquille O’Neal. By default, the product has already sold itself by association - who would you rather listen to about weight loss, Shaq or some guy in a white frock on a herbal supplement site?
Next, I always try to increase the amount of my payout by looking for the kinds of offers that send free samples of a related, complementary product and all the customer has to pay for is s&h. The customer gets this as a sort of thank you for signing up - and it turns out to be a win-win situation for everybody. Rocket Profit has such an offer, the Power Tea Weight Loss Sample.
Build a site
I would start a self-hosted Wordpress blog as opposed to a site - primarily because I can rank easier for organic search traffic and Wordpress has so many free design templates and plugins this makes it easy to build a really professional looking blog in no time. Plus a blog allows me to build a connection with my potential audience and most importantly - I can easily build a RSS base which I can also monetize. I won’t go into the details of building a Wordpress blog - but Caroline Middlebrook has an excellent resource here. I would name the blog something like familyweightloss.com - notice that there’s no mention of the actual specific product in the title. This is important because if for some reason the offer is no longer available, I can just substitute another weight loss product.
Another advantage of picking an offer based on a famous celebrity is that you just might run into this person and grab the chance for a photo. Post that prominently on your blog and your credibility is through the roof! Anybody attending NBA All Star Weekend 2008 this year?
Create a Target Customer Profile
I’d create a profile of my target audience. In this case they are families - where do families hang out online? Weight-loss forums? Health & Fitness sites? I would target Dad & Mom, especially Moms because they often control the diet for the entire household. Plus, Moms will tell other Moms and you can’t beat word of mouth advertising.
Drive traffic to my site
Traffic can either come to your offer directly, or indirectly (organically) via a search engine. I focus 80% of my efforts in driving direct traffic to my site, you are at the mercy of the search engines for organic traffic. I would do these things to send direct traffic to my offer:
- Article Submission - submit well written, original weight loss articles to ezinearticles etc on the challenges families face trying to stay healthy, obesity in teens, etc with a link back to my site
- Leverage social media sites such as squidoo, stumbleupon
- Hang out at weight loss forums
- Hang out where parents hang out online - school message boars, community bulletin boards etc. This will not be difficult if you have an accurate customer profile
- Become an active, relevant commentator at high powered health related blogs in my niche
- Employ some offline marketing such as leaving some flyers at a gym or fitness club, buying some custom t-shirts with my url - handing these out to friends etc
All the above items also have the added benefit of creating organic traffic for you. I would also launch a PPC campaign with a focus on highly targeted keywords and phrases. There’s an excellent article here that I recommend you read on running a PPC campaign on a low budget. Even if you have lots of money to spend, this article will help you stretch your dollars longer.
Conclusion
There’s no secret to making money as an affiliate marketer - it takes working smart and time. Build something valuable, something that fills a need with an eye towards long term growth. You have the solution, drive the people who need your solution to your site directly or organically. Install free tracking software on your site such as Google Analytics, optimize and tweak accordingly. Turn yourself into an authority in your niche. Rinse, dry and repeat. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a long-term cash cow to go build.
A Few Mentioned Resources
Sign up for Rocket Profit here
Lose Weight with Shaq’s Big Family Weight Loss Challenge
Receive a Free Sample of Power Tea Weight Loss
Is The Starwood American Express card the best rewards Credit Card for Affiliate Marketers?
As an Affiliate Marketer, the kind of credit card that you use can make all the difference in the world. You should be treating affiliate marketing as a business, and as such you need a serious business card. If you are using your personal credit card for your online efforts you might as well be [...]
Markethealth.com Affiliate Network Review
JoeBucks, you’re all grown up now. The natural supplements affiliate program formerly known as JoeBucks.com is now MarketHealth.com. In addition to promoting their own products, MarketHealth also provides a turnkey solution for other health care product merchants. I’ve personally used MarketHealth and they are simply one of the best programs around for affiliates - more [...]
Is a Bad Credit Score killing your chances as an Affiliate Marketer?
Affiliate Marketing, like any other money making venture online should be viewed and treated as a business - a lot of the same basic rules apply. Considering that the barriers to entry for online businesses are extremely low, it’s easy to just throw up a website or blog and hope for the best.
Affiliate marketing is a business, (a fun business once you get the hang of it) you should treat it as such. For the new affiliate marketer, you will need money (you can do without - but it will take you soooo much longer as you will have to get traffic organically which can take weeks or even months) to get those campaigns up and running asap and drive traffic to your sites.
One of the dirty little secrets of affiliate marketing is the huge expense it takes to discover a successful campaign. Top affiliate marketers will think nothing of spending at least $500 a day, and this is just to “test” the campaign. Once they’ve discovered which keywords convert well, it’s not uncommon to throw thousands at the campaign - and this is at least for a week. So that’s anywhere from $2500 - $5000 per week or two. Granted you don’t have to spend this much to get started (then again you might if you’re in a highly competitive niche, like insurance or mortgage refinancing), but you have to spend money to make money. No way around it.
Which brings the up the question of seed money. Just like almost a regular bricks and mortar business, you can either:
- Bootstrap
- Get money from friends, family or fools
- Sell your soul on eBay
- Get a loan
It’s my guess that you’ll be hard pressed to find money from anyone other than yourself. Your friends and family will call you the fool - because another dirty secret of affiliate marketing is nothing is guaranteed. You could have the sweetest landing page, a very high quality score from Google Adwords etc and still not make any sales for the first week or so. Then you might be running a campaign for a merchant that only pays quarterly etc - so getting a loan is out the window. Many an affiliate has gone in the negative, myself included when working on what might eventually turn out to be a successful campaign.
The only answer to your problem, in regards to seed money as an affiliate marketer is credit cards. You’re toast without a good one. If you have bad credit, you’re killing your chances at succeeding even before you get started and you will need to fix your credit. As you become better at affiliate marketing, you will eventually have multiple campaigns running, each with it’s own thousand dollar budget.
Many new affiliates fail because they simply do not have enough capital to keep a successful campaign running, or jump on a hot opportunity. Don’t let this happen to you.
Click here to receive a FREE mini-guide on how to add up to 50 points to your credit score under 31 days.
This post was brought to you by the Ultimate Credit eBook - Do you have A+ Credit?
The World’s Most Evil blogger is sending one lucky person to Las Vegas
The world’s most evil blogger is sending one lucky person to Las Vegas this February to attend Affiliate Summit West 2008, where he will be a keynote speaker along with Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta in a session called Super Affiliate Strategies that Work.
Affiliate Summit West 2008 looks like it’s pretty much going to be [...]
Are you Cloaking your Affiliate Links?
As an affiliate marketer, there may be many reasons why you might want to consider cloaking your affiliate links:
- Preventing other affiliates from stealing or hijacking your links
- Better link management - A merchant may expire or get dropped from an affiliate network and you need to reflect those changes on your site. It’s much easier to update the link in one location and have a sitewide effect as opposed to trying to remember everywhere you used that particular affiliate link. I learned the hard way when I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting invalid links in my commission junction reports.
- Normal affiliate links are very long - e.g. yoursite.com/product.php vs www.merchantwebsite/mumbo12121jumbo……r&23232@%$?ref=affid=007 - which one would you click on?
- You may want to cloak the links from search engines or prevent bots from crawling the links
- Users are more likely to click on clean looking links, increasing your affiliate conversion rates
There are many ways to mask your affiliate links - I’m only going to cover a few. The most easiest way is by a simple .htaccess redirect method. Let’s say we want to launch a campaign promoting mangoes from a fictional merchant “selfpreneursmangomania.com”.
- Create a .htacess file at the root of your site (use notepad or any other plain text editor)
- Add the following: redirect 301 /buymangoes http://www.selfpreneursmangomania.com/mumbo12121jumbo….r&23232@%$?ref=affid=007
You’re done. Redirect 301 just tells search engine spiders that the links you are redirecting to are not on your site. “Somename” is whatever you want to call what you’re marketing. Your masked link will now be something like yoursite/buymangoes.
The problem with using the .htacess file to manage your links is that after a while, as the .htaccess file grows larger your site will slow down. Everytime there is a request, the server checks the .htaccess file. The more links you have in there, the longer it takes to read etc.
URL Redirection sites are another method of hiding your affiliate links.
- Go to a site like tinyurl.com
- Enter your affliate link
- Use the resulting the link the site will give you, something like http://tinyurl.com/3drlg3
Use http://tinyurl.com/3drlg3 wherever you want to market that item. The problem with this method is that the link doesn’t really look nice. It’s short, confusing and you’ve just handed control of your affiliate link to another company.
In my humble opinion, the best method of hiding your affiliate links in my opinion is by using php redirects along with a robots.txt file.
- Create a file called buymangoes.php in a subdirectory on your site
- Open up your .htaccess file (create one if you don’t have one at the root of your directory) and add the affiliate link you are given in the location area <? header(”Location: http://www.yourwebsite/mumbo12121jumbo….r&23232@%$?ref=affid=007); ?>. So now your affiliate link should be within the file called buymangoes.php. The link that refers to that particular gadget will now be yoursite/subdirectory/buymangoes.php
- At your root directory, create a file called robots.txt and add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /subdirectory/
This tells bots not to ignore links that for items in that subdirectory. This way if you ever need to manage your links just look for the php file and edit the php file accordingly.
Last but not the least, always make sure that whatever program you’re promoting allows the use of redirects. Why do all that hard work to pluck those mangoes only to find out that you can’t eat them?
Know of an even better method? Let us know in the comments section.
Do you have a Business Plan for your online strategy?
Before you begin your online venture (blog, e-commerce site etc), giving some thought and consideration as to where you’d like to end up in a couple of years will could ultimately mean the difference between success and failure. Launching an online venture WILL take up a considerable amount of your time, energy and financial resources. Here’s how to ensure that those resources are spent in an effective manner:
1. Start with the end in mind: Consider both your short term and long term goals. Give some thought to where you’d like to end up in a year, 3yrs or 5 yrs down the road. What are the basic goals behind your decision to start an online venture - do you desire the ability to spend more time with your family, achieving financial independence? Picture yourself in the future, and write this down to help provide you with motivation for the rough times ahead. What are you doing this for?
2. How do you plan to make money online: Will it be from a blog (e.g. ad sales), online retailing, multi-level marketing, etc? There are so many business opportunities available, and failure to clearly choose and identify one can make you feel overwhelmed and confused. You should also give some thought to marketing costs involved with choosing your online strategy - the costs (minimal to zero) of someone who plans to make money online blogging will vastly differ from someone who wants to operate an e-commerce site.
3. Know your audience: Who is your audience? Develop a profile for your target audience
- How old are they?
- Where do they hang out - both online and off?
- How will you market to them - can you find them on MySpace, Facebook, at your local gym, grocery store etc?
Knowing this will help ensure that your audience finds your message receptive. For example, would you try and sell a life insurance policy on MySpace? You probably wouldn’t do very well - the majority of MySpace users are teenagers and young adults. However something like ringtones would be excellent. Know your audience!
4. Network, network, network! Join as many groups, forums, social networking sites as you can in your industry. Establish relationships with other influential people in your niche and the media as soon as you can. Networks are great places to market yourself and learn of the latest developments and events in your industry. Networking groups are also great places to receive support from experienced business people in your industry.
5. Plan B / Exit Strategy: What will you do if things do not ultimately work out the way you expect them to? Will you just give up entirely, flip your blog/site/service for a profit or try your hand at another industry? Thinking about this ahead of time will help you identify other potential business markets and expansion opportunities.
Mapping your course to success beforehand will help ensure that you do just that, succeed!
