Top 5 Best Affiliate Keyword Research Tools
Affiliate marketing is more than just playing with your landing pages and finding the right offers. Sure. Finding products that people can actually buy and get value from is a part of the process. But you want to make sure people can get to your landing pages and get connected with what you are trying to convey. That’s why you need to invest in a premium keyword research tool to help you with your affiliate campaigns.
You can always get away with using free keyword tools when you are starting, but if you want to expand your business, you are going to need the right tools. With that in mind, here are top 5 best affiliate keyword tools that can help you take your campaign to the next level:
Keyword Country: The ultimate tool for affiliate marketers that often goes unnoticed. It’s used by both Adwords and Adsense experts. Great way to put the right foot forward in a new niche. It can help you discover new markets too.
Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spying tools on the market. Whether you are interested in spying on your competitors or just want to figure out what markets can be lucrative for you to enter, Keyword Spy comes handy.
SpyFu: another one of those top spying tools that helps you develop long keyword lists, spy on your competitors, and find out new markets to enter to. You can use Kombat feature to compare your campaigns against your competitors. (more…)
8 Best Wordpress Themes for Affiliates
A lot of affiliates are now starting to understand the power of Wordpress when it comes to developing affiliate portals to make money online. A few years ago, people used to use those good old HTML based websites to get their affiliate landing pages up and running. But with the power of Wordpress, you can manage huge portals easily without sweating a break. Best of all, Wordpress is for free, so you’ve really got nothing to lose by using Wordpress for your affiliate websites. Just make sure you choose a good theme to keep things looking as professional as possible.
If you are looking for a cool affiliate theme for Wordpress that not only is well-designed but it gives you the chance to make more sales everyday, here are 8 affiliate Wordpress themes you should consider:
eShop: many affiliate marketers make money by selling products from Amazon and eBay. If you happen to be in that group, you are going to find eShop for Wordpress pretty useful. Makes it easy to create a store around affiliate products.
Kidz Store: another attractive e-shop Wordpress theme that you can use to sell affiliate products. You can even build your own store and mix it up with your affiliate products. The choice is yours.
Classipress: a powerful classified listing theme for affiliate marketers. While you can use this theme to create a fully-fledged classified website, you can also build a killer affiliate portal. Just be creative!
Affiliate Theme: the ultimate theme for affiliate marketers. If you are looking to start your review site or just manage your landing pages, Affiliate Theme comes in very handy. (more…)
How To Use Lists To Promote Affiliate Products
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that lists are in demand. People seem to eat up lists, no matter what they are about. If you have visited popular websites such as Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, you have probably seen lists make it to the top of their front-pages. Of course, not all lists are created equal. You can always slap a list together and hope for the best. The better way to do it is by adding as much value as you can with your list.
Don’t Be Cheap with Affiliate Hosting
There are a lot of affiliates who assume that you can get everything they need to build a huge business without spending too much money to get it done. Many affiliates start their journey in the affiliate marketing world with free or cheap web hosts. There is nothing wrong with paying $5 a month for a shared hosting plans, but if you are running a business that people care about, you want to make sure your website is up all the time.
There are many shared hosting web hosting plans that promise you unlimited everything for only a few dollars a month. That would work fine if you only have a couple of sites and don’t drive too many people to your website. But shared hosting doesn’t work out too well if you are getting a decent amount of traffic. Imagine investing a lot of time and effort into your online business to drive people to your website through paid and organic search. Wouldn’t it be devastating if your site is somehow down when your visitors get to your website? (more…)
How To Use Google Products To Find Affiliate Partners
A lot of affiliates just assume that in order to make money, you have to partner with Amazon, eBay, and other big stores. There is no question that as long as you play your cards right, you can earn a decent amount of cash from Amazon and other top websites. But you should not forget about small retailers who might be offering better prices on some items than even what Amazon has to offer. One of the best ways to build credibility with your audience is by helping it save money. If you keep sending people to Amazon and eBay without checking prices, you could lose credibility and your traffic in the process. That’s where Google Products (formerly known as Froogle) comes in. It’s a very helpful service by Google that lets you compare prices and find retailers that have the lowest prices for the item you are planning to promote on your website.
Google Products not only helps you provide the best prices to your customers, it also enables you to find products that people are searching for. On the front-page, you can find products that people have recently searched for. So you can easily get an idea what’s hot on any given day. What’s more impressive about Google Product Search is the fact that you can identify those smaller retailers and partner up with them to earn more money with your website.
Amazon Affiliates and Free Search Results
Affiliate marketing is one of the most interesting businesses to be involved in. One day you could be on the top of the world. But things could change very quickly the very next day. The way states are going after affiliates with Internet tax, you could certainly see affiliates suffering and small businesses that are using this model to stay afloat closing their doors. But if you thought that was bad, wait till you see what Amazon seems to be planning for its own affiliate program. The company owns one of the most profitable affiliate programs on the market, but it seems it’s not profitable enough. At least not in the UK and CA:
In addition, as of February 1, 2010 we will no longer pay referral fees on purchases made by customers who are referred to http://www.amazon.co.uk or http://www.javari.co.uk via Free Search Results. Free Search Results are links containing an Associate’s tag displayed in a search engine’s free, natural, or organic search results in response to a search query which send customers directly to an Amazon site without the customer first being sent to an Associate’s site and the customer clicking on a link to arrive at the Amazon site.
So why is this bad news? You may ask yourself, how can you even show up in the SERPs with only your URL. Believe it or not that’s possible and is a tactic used by super affiliates to make money on a daily basis. It’s a fairly short-term strategy, but if your URL happens to show up in the SERPs, you can earn a whole lot of money in a fairly short period of time. But Amazon is cracking on that practice, and in the process penalizing folks who don’t intentionally optimize their links to rank higher in the SERPs.
Affiliate Software Change: Frustration for Affiliates
Affiliate managers are going to use the software that gives them the best options possible. So it’s not too unreasonable for them to make software changes from time to time. If you happen to be partnering with CJ or LinkShare affiliates, chances are you won’t have to worry too much about affiliate software changes. But affiliate programs do jump from one network to another from time to time. That all means that affiliates will have to be alert about the links that they are using on their websites and have a way to keep track of them. Affiliate programs do tend to give affiliates enough time to change their links, but that’s not always a given.
I have seen so many affiliates that are all over the place with their approach to adding links to their websites. It’s so easy to just use a service such as bit.ly to add affiliate links to your website. Sure, the tracking is nice. But if there is a change in your affiliate URLs, you are going to have to do a lot of URL updating. Spending time updating URLs all over your campaigns is not the best way to use your time, which is why you should never use a third party service to handle your affiliate links.
Affiliate Management: Ways To Go
Not all affiliate managers are the same. I admit that there are a few that take the time to work with affiliates and genuinely want to help them achieve more from their campaigns. But laziness has become a norm in the affiliate industry. Some affiliate managers don’t respond to affiliates e-mails even when they are not too busy. They just don’t check their e-mails more than once a week. There are others who go further and don’t pay their affiliates on time. You want to know the worst kind? Those who slack off for 20 days a month and then rush things through in the remaining days (often making mistakes along the way).
You can have all the certifications and knowledge in the world. If you don’t take time to improve your performance in your job, then you are not doing yourself or your company a favor. I admit that affiliate program managers are often underpaid. After all, while they do manage affiliates, they are not seen as those who directly contribute to the bottom-line (which is somewhat untrue). Top affiliate managers can actually help companies make more money by engaging affiliates, establishing relationships with them, and partnering up with those who have not taken the time to become an affiliate.
Don’t Let Refunds To Discourage You
New affiliate marketers are always more jumpy and sensitive to everything that happens to their business. I have seen so many affiliates that get discouraged when Google slaps their pages and asks them for more money to keep their pages on the first page. A lot of it is due to people setting unreasonable expectations for themselves and their business. It’s true that there are a lot of people who are making a killing with affiliate products. These folks have mastered the art of Google Adwords and affiliate marketing and have developed a well tuned system that keeps making them money in the most difficult times. Newbie affiliates don’t have that luxury.
One of the biggest steps in running a business is planning. Planning on how you are going to make money. How you are going to promote your business? What tactics you are going to use to make money online? What does it take to break even? These are things that master affiliate marketers take into account. Let’s say you have made a killing in a month. Do go on spending all the revenue you have earned on things before accounting for refunds and other miscellaneous fees. Those who have been in business long do have a sense for refund rates, so they do account for that when preparing their break-even analysis. (more…)
5 Ways To Expand Your Affiliate Business in 2010
The new year is finally here, and yet another cycle begins for us affiliate marketers. If you think about it, affiliate marketers don’t really have off days. We are going to have slow days and weeks depending on the niche we are in, but you can’t take Christmas or the New Year’s day off if those are the days your target shoppers are out there shopping. If you have time to take off, you have time to invest more efforts in your business. Now I am not suggesting that you should never take off or have fun when you are running a business. But affiliate marketing is all about being at the top of your game when your target audience is ready to spend.
The holiday season may be over, and many affiliates are already evaluating and implementing new plans for the new year. Some of the things you can do are obviously niche specific. But there are general things you can do to improve your affiliate business in 2010. Here are 5 ways how:
- Conquer Social Media: social media is here to say. If you haven’t taken time to create a social media presence for your affiliate portal or reach out to your target audience on Twitter and Facebook, the time is now. You don’t want to spam those people, but you want to use the tools available to build a solid relationship with them. The time for reading social media books is over. It’s time to act.
- New Markets: the new year’s day is always my favorite time of the year. It’s usually the day I go over the markets I targeted in the previous year and the niches I want to target in the new year. I am not suggesting that I go about the process in one day. But my New Year’s day is more relaxed and great for brainstorming and identifying a broad set of niches to target in the new year. (more…)