How To Become An Expert On Any Topic In Less Than A Week

One key issue that most affiliates face these days is how to write content about topics that they don’t know much about. Let’s say you do your research, and you find a niche (e.g. the insurance niche) that you want to create an affiliate site about. While the topic is very interesting to you, you have limited knowledge about the topic in general. One thing you don’t want to do is pretend that you are an expert. Now, that’s a no-no. If you claim something and it turns out that it’s totally wrong, then you lose all your credibility, and you have to start over. But what most affiliate don’t realize is that you don’t have to be at the top of the class to make it in any niche. You just need to have enough information to be dangerous. Here is how you can become a good enough expert on a topic in less than a week:

• RSS Feeds: do yourself a favor and sign up for either Google reader or bloglines. These are necessity these days. Check Technorati or Bloglines top 1000, to find relevant feeds to your topic. Then set sometime aside to go through posts that are tagged as for beginners or intermediate readers. It shouldn’t take you too long to go through most of them. You will find some of them to be repetitive (most bloggers are), so it will you less than probably a day to read everything you need to know to be dangerous about your niche.
• Books: Go to amazon and pick up a couple of recent books on your topic. I recommend getting the most recent book + the most praised book on your topic. If you read fast enough, you should be able to finish them in less than 4 days.
• Forums: Check forums related in your niche and look for questions that could make an interested article for your affiliate site. If you are selling a solution, you maybe able to use these questions to write good solid content about it. Also, learn from the answers provided to your question. If you are not sure about something, just ask. That’s what forums are there for.

Most affiliates have this notion that you have to be an absolute top notch expert to market a product. That’s simply not true. You need to be good enough to pick up skills in a short period of time, but as long as you know what you are talking about, then you are set. You don’t need a PhD. in a topic in order to be able to make it.

SEO, SEA, or Both?

I have seen too many affiliates who focus either on SEO (search engine optimization) or SEA (search engine advertising) to drive traffic to their affiliate sites. Many super-affiliates swear by Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search marketing services when it comes to generating leads. I don’t disagree with them, but if you treat affiliate marketing as a business, then you should always look for ways to achieve synergies across your marketing efforts. By focusing only on search engine advertising, you leave all your eggs in one basket. Besides, why would you leave SEO and free traffic out of your marketing plans when you can use it to help bring your overall CPA down.

But it’s not just about SEO or PPC. You should try other avenues such as display media and joint ventures to drive even more traffic to your site. If you have used any successful Clickbank products, you have probably seen how effective the concept of JV is. You sell a product and drive people to your partners site to make yet another sale. It could even be that you generate e-mail leads for them. Regardless, you both end up in a better place.

Affiliate marketing is about leaving no door unturned. So don’t worry too much about getting things wrong. Everybody does. The key is to learn from mistakes and get it right the next time!

Should You Go With Commission Junction or LinkShare?

I admit. When I started my journey in the affiliate marketing world, I was naive. All I cared about was making some quick cash. So I joined every single program on the planet and thought I could just slap them on a web page and start making millions. After all, that’s what those late night infomercials make you believe. But more importantly, I didn’t pay attention to smaller networks and only focused on Commission Junction and LinkShare. Fast forward years, and I can tell you now that your strategy should rarely revolve the big networks. Take the credit card market for example. If you go with LinkShare and CJ, you get limited support, and less commission per sale. However, if you join a niche master affiliate, you can get one to one support, and better commission rates. Just to clarify, commission is not the reason you should go with master affiliates, but the attention is. If you are just starting in the affiliate marketing world, it always does help to have someone to direct your question to.

Some of the best programs are not even available on the major networks, so depending on your niche, you may want to skip working with CJ or LinkShare. After all, signing up for programs that you won’t be promoting is the best way to waste your and the advertisers’ time.

Why Having The Right Work Environment Matters?

Have you ever thought about why in the corporate environment, people with offices are in general more happy than others. In my opinion, having the flexibility to design your own work environment (which you don’t get to do when you are in a cubicle) can go a long way to setting the tone for your everyday. When I was in the corporate environment, I hate the whole cubicle experience. There was never enough light, and you felt as if you were in prison for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. Very painful.

But the good thing about having your affiliate business is that you have much more flexibility. You can start when you want and design your office how you want. I do recommend that you take time to figure out the right conditions for you (lighting, colors, and …). I also recommend having a separate room for your office. I have tried the whole running a business from a bedroom thing, and I can tell you it doesn’t work well for most people. If you can’t rent a place for your business, you can just try a different room. But make sure you don’t spend too much time behind the computer. I know some super-affiliates who run their businesses from their beach houses. Not everyone has that option, but it is certainly something to aim for, isn’t it?

What’s the Single Most Important Buy For Your Affiliate Business

If you truly want to become a superaffiliate, you need to treat affiliate marketing as a real business and not just a hobby. If you do treat affiliate marketing as a business, there are going to be business decisions that you will have to make such as purchasing new computers, office furnitures, phone lines, cell phones, logos, and …. During my time as an affiliate manaer, I was often asked what I thought was the most important part of an affiliate business. I always thought that having a good design that converts the best is the most important to affiliates. But when I moved to the other side of the aisle, I finally got what mattered the most – hosting.

Think about it. You can have the best design in the world, and you know it converts 20% of your leads. You can have the best looking logo in the business and all the Web 2.0 whistles. You can even buy the most comprehensive email marketing service out there, but if you are not serving your site to your visitors, then all your efforts will be worth nothing. I remember when I first started my comparison website for HDTVs. I thought I had a very good design, and could make $30 to $50 an hour from my site. But all the effort that I put into that website went down the drain when I realized it wasn’t loading up. I never really checked the site to see if it was down. I assumed that just because the backend was working, the information was getting loaded into the front-end. So here is my advice. If you can afford to get your own server, do yourself a favor and go with that option. But if you don’t, try services such as EC2 and S3 from Amazon and other Grid computing solutions for your web applications. What you definitely don’t want to see is lost sales due to having a cheap web host. Cheap hosts are great for your hobbies. They are not as useful for real business.

The Truth About Affiliate Marketing

Haven’t you heard that before? If you go to clickbank or other info product sites, you’ll probably see a thousand titles that start with “the truth about.” The fact is, this line is a tested and tried copy that works beautifully when it comes to taking their money and selling them things they wouldn’t buy normally. Now if you get one of those books about affiliate marketing, these guys tell you how they dominate PPC, and make money out of that. Some even claim that they use Squidoo to make millions of dollars But there is no shortcut in our industry. You can’t expect to become a millionaire with affiliate marketing without doing your math. Even if you are paid $100 per every single sale that you make, you would need 10,000 sales to make it to that million, and getting to that number can’t be achieved by spending nothing right out of the bat. So here is how true affiliate marketers approach it:

• Diversification: SEO is great. Article marketing is effective, but you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. The truth of the matter is, if you put all your effots into one area only, then you are not going to have a way out once your plan fails. Try multiple strategies to stay ahead of the game.
• Complimentary tactics: I am sure you have heard of the concept of “synergy.” Sometimes tying your online marketing efforts can bring you more than they would individually by themselves. Always look out for synergy areas.
• Outsourcing: you may ask, how super-affiliates all that stuff in one day. It’s simple. Even the poorest super-affiliates outsource some parts of their business to focus on their core competency. You can’t expect to get everything done by yourself and have time to strategize.
• Research: you need to have your own R&D department to make it in today’s marketing world. There are so many methods that you can use to promote affiliate products. But the edge is usually in the unknown, new methods. If it’s so new that nobody knows about it, it’s time to jump in!

Remember, super affiliates start from somewhere. If you give up to early, you are never going to know what might have been.

How much interaction do you need to have with your affiliate managers?

That’s the question many affiliate should be asking yet many ignore the whole concept. Remember that as an affiliate you are in a business relationship with your merchant, and they are there to help you succeed so they succeed as a result. Now here is the thing. A lot of affiliates go days, weeks, and months without interacting with their affiliate managers. As a former affiliate manager, I can tell you now that I paid more attention to the success of the affiliates who looked more engaged. If you take time to set up a time with me to talk about strategies that we both can use to succeed together, you’ve got my attention. I did get a bunch of calls from people who were just interested in a higher commission rate, but overall there were a few affiliates (the very top ones) that truly cared about the relationship. So working closely with your affiliate manager could make a big difference.

Whether you are interested only in more money or just using the poor manager to get some favors done (e.g. customized banners), you should always set the stage before asking for things. You shouldn’t jump the gun and say, “hi there, can I get a higher commission?” That almost never works. But if you come up with a set of strategies (PPC, content, …) that have the potential to generate more sales, you can expect your affiliate manager to be more open to the idea of increasing your commission or doing other favors for you. Remember, you are in a business relationship. You need to nourish it! What have you got to lose?

Affiliate Marketing Is Not All About PPC

If you have checked ClickBank or some popular affiliate forums, you may get the impression that affiliate marketing is all about pay per click marketing. That couldn’t be furthest about the truth. Pay per click marketing and search arbitrage can be extremely attractive if you get everything right. There are a few affiliate marketers who are doing that, but we are talking about a very few. For everyone else, PPC marketing is just a waste of money in general.

In essence, in order to get the PPC part right, you need to develop the best keywords in a good enough niche that will enable you to earn profit per click. If you go to a mature market with more than 20 advertisers, there is a good chance that you will have to put a significant investment upfront before seeing any tangible result.

The key to affiliate marketing is diversification. It’s not about PPC alone. PPC should be part of your portfolio. But you have to try your hands in SEO, article marketing, media, partnerships, newsletter, and social media. For instance, you may have a product that pays you $100 per sale. You might have to spend $150 per sale on pay per click to get the word out about your site. But if you are diversifying, you can bring the cost down to a level where you are making profit. So don’t think about only pay-per-click marketing for your affiliate business. It is important but not the ultimate solution.

3 Affiliate Events That You Shouldn’t Miss

Affiliate marketing is all about making new contacts and advancing existing relationships. The best way to do so is to attend a few affiliate marketing events a year. Here are the ones that most serious affiliates attend:

LinkShare Symposium: LinkShare Symposium which is generally held in NY City is a great affiliate event to meet affiliate managers. You have deal maker and partner maker programs which allow affiliates and merchants to get together and discuss their relationships. If you live in the east coast, this is a must go. There are not many events in this area so attending the Symposium can help you catch up with the industry.

CJU: Commission Junction university is not only a great educational conference, but you also get to meet exclusive CJ partners in the event. CJU 2008 was held in Calfornia and it was a glorious event. I do recommend attending this event if you have a strong connection with CJ.

Affiliate Summit: Affiliate Summit East and West are two events that have the best value for affiliates in my opinion. You not only get to see affiliate partners in these events, you also get a bunch of cool sessions on the state of the industry. The atmosphere is informal and easy, so you don’t have to dress for success and have success in this event (though you want to look OK). Affiliate Summit Social Media is a new event that has been added to this series and focuses on the social media. Haven’t attended that one yet myself but based on my experience with the other two Summits, it should be good!

There are a lot of other events that you can go to as an affiliate, but you want to make sure that you maximize your ROI and time by going to the ones that matter. Have fun traveling and drop me a note if you are going to be at an upcoming event.

AffSphere: What Is It?

AffSphere.com has just launched for affiliate marketers. AffSphere is a article syndication service where you can submit your articles and have it syndicated on the web. But how is it different from a normal article directory? AffSphere helps you earn money in multiple ways.

You can promote affiliate products in your articles if you like. You can also put affiliate links in your research boxes. The major selling point here is that AffSphere which is brought up by Affiliate Class Room is basically affiliate friendly. You can write articles and get backlinks to your site. You can also make money in the process.

Interesting service if you have sometime on your hands.