Should You Follow Your Passions?

That’s the question many new affiliates ask themselves at some point in their career. In fact, a lot of affiliates start out promoting products that are related to their passions/hobbies. A lot of gurus talks about how you should pursue things that you love and promote products in niches that you are passionate about. I am not sure I agree with that. Being passionate about something can often take your unbiased perspective away. 

People are often too attached to their passions. You love baseball, and you want to get into that market. Of course, since you are passionate about it, you believe you have what it takes to beat people who have been in that market for years. Now only someone who’s biased about that niche would make rash decisions and enter the market without proper research. In reality, if you are neutral about baseball, you have a better chance of doing your math to figure out if the niche is a viable option for you and your business. 

Doing what you love is an absolute gift that not many of us get to do. If you love affiliate marketing and you are not spending your day time pulling your hairs out, then you understand the business side of it. Affiliate marketing is a business, not a hobby or a walk in the park. If you don’t make money, it’s rat race time. In my case, I was willing to sacrificing all TV shows, PS3 games, and late night parties to make it in my niche. Not many people are willing to do that. And some people believe they can do all that and make a living in the affiliate marketing world. You may! But that never worked for me, and I doubt it works for a lot people. At the end of the day, you should think about EPC, market size, and things like that before jumping in a niche that you love but could be potentially worthless for affiliates. Good luck!

The Dreaded No Sale Email…

you have been in the affiliate marketing world for a while now, there is a good chance that you have received a note about your low number of sales from a merchant. If you haven’t, then just bare with me. We affiliate managers like to motivate our affiliates to do better every day. We do that by having competitions, sweepstakes, and crazy bonuses. But once in a while, you find affiliates who are not just promoting you, so you reach out to them to ask them if there is a way help them promote your product more effectively. I have sent those notes and have gotten them from my affiliate managers a numerous times. No big deal here.

A lot of people that I know receive these notes and just ignore them. What’s the worst that can happen? You can be terminated. But the truth is, you should pay attention to these affiliate programs. We all have so many projects at hand that sometimes we lose a little bit of perspective. Let’s say you are making $1K a day, and you don’t get to see that one of your mini campaigns is performing poorly. What affiliate managers don’t realize is that the problem is not always the affiliate but the merchants themselves. A lot of merchants have poor landing pages that just drive people away. As an affiliate you keep driving traffic to it, and it all goes down the drain.

Affiliates need to be proactive and reach out to their managers to have a frank conversation. If you have driving 200-300 people to a landing page and have not gotten a single sale, then you either need to design a new landing page yourself or terminate your affiliate agreement. I personally keep an eye on all my campaigns, but it is completely normal to lose sight of some of these campaigns once in a while. The key is to react strongly by thinking about ways that you can convert traffic. Of course, a lot of affiliates choose the cash out and run approach, but you can’t do that forever or can you?

What’s In It For Me….

I can tell you from experience that many affiliate marketers only think about making a few quick bucks and nothing else. We all want to make a decent living. There is no question about that. But the merchants are out there to make profits as well. So at some point, asking for more commission is not going to work out unless you demonstrate that you can deliver more leads/actions/sales/subscriptions for your merchant. 

But is money the most important issue when it comes to affiliate marketing? I personally don’t think so. Short-term cash is just that: good for short-term. Most successful affiliate marketers plan to build business and not necessarily make quick bucks in a short period of time. So there are more things in affiliate marketing than money:

•  Passion: affiliate marketing is an amazing avenue to do what you love. If you pick a niche that is related to your lifetime passion, you get to promote products and educate yourself on the latest solutions related to your passion. What can be better than that? We all hate the 9-5 job as it robs us from pursuing our dreams and passions. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in.
• Long-term Assets: asset that you build during your affiliate marketing career stay with you for quite some time. Even if you decide to go back to your 9-5 job after a couple of years, you can always look back at your assets as the proof for your experience, or you can just sell them off. But if you are good at developing long-term assets, chances are you don’t need a day job.
• Relationships: you get to network and build relationships with so many people and some of these relationships can open big door for you. And no-one can take these relationships away from you. 
• Cash: it would be hypocritical of me to come out and say that money doesn’t matter. But I don’t believe in going for short-term money. I rather lose a few bucks here and there today, knowing that I will make 10 or 100 times more in a year time. That’s the beauty of affiliate marketing.

Should You Drive Traffic Directly To Merchants’ Pages?

That’s the main question many beginner affiliates have to wrestle with. Let’s say you want to promote an insurance offer. Do you build your own page and then redirect people to the merchant’s site, or do you just buy Google Adwords traffic and direct them to the merchant’s site?

The latter is really what was called Google Cash method a few years ago. In essence, in the dark times of the Internet you could buy traffic and send it to the merchant site and try to achieve search arbitrage. But Google has really come down hard on people who try Google cash. First, you simply can’t use the same display URL as the merchant as only one URL is allowed. Second, many networks such as Clickbank limit you on what you can do with Google Adwords. Besides, a lot of merchants protect themselves from you bidding on their main terms, so you are going to be stuck with less quality terms to bid on the same landing page.

The goal of an affiliate marketer should be to drive traffic to the merchant and at the same time retain people who have been referred to the merchant with her investment. You can’t achieve that with direct Google cash method. However, if you have your own landing page with a newsletter box to collect your audience’s contact information, you can go back to them and sell them complementary products in the future. Even if you were to pull off the Google cash method, you would still be better off with your own landing page. So the sooner you get started on that, the better.

Affiliate Keyword Policy: Things To Remember

Pay per click marketing is the most popular way for affiliates to promote merchants’ products. Pay per click marketing is easy to implement and can be used to test affiliate ideas very quickly, but most new affiliate marketers make the mistake of stepping on the toes of their merchants and feel their wraths.

One mistake that many affiliate make is bidding on their merchant’s branded terms without asking permission. Google does its best to prevent you from doing so, but many affiliates use sneaky tactics such as adding other characters to the beginning of branded terms to bend the rules ( e.g “@CNN”). The truth is most merchants have other channels that are way more successful than the affiliate channel. One of those channels is probably the PPC channel. There is no question that the average cost per sale or acquisition is much lower for branded terms than no branded terms, and the reason for that is the low level of competition for those terms. But if you jump in as an affiliate and start pushing the bids higher and higher, the merchant is going to feel the paid in the PPC channel. Besides, a lot of merchants have valuable brands, and they don’t want affiliate to mess with their brands.

It is essential for new affiliates to read the bidding policy before starting their PPC campaigns. But more so, you should contact your affilite manager and ask her about what’s allowed and what’s not. I can tell you that some merchants have open bidding policy, but a lot of experienced affiliates don’t even bother bidding on branded terms as they assume it is forbidden. Asking is always the way to go. Remember, your affiliate manager is there to help you succeed.

5 Ways To Do Your Market Research Right

The most important success factor in the affiliate business is doing your homework. When you do your homework and know your market inside and out, you can tap into the potential of the market and satisfy the unique needs of your prospects. So how do you do market research? It really sounds intimidating and many people think of that as a super secret method that is only known to people graduating from Harvard or Yale, but the truth of the matter is, you may be already doing market research without knowing it.

Thanks to Google and a few other companies, there are many tools out there that allow you to keep your ear on the ground and figure out the hot markets. In addition, you can keep a eye on your market to see trends and upcoming developments that can give you an edge over your competitors by using these resources:

• Google Alerts/Google Reader: Google Reader is the tool to keep track of your favorite industry RSS feeds to keep yourself up to date. In addition, you can use it in conjunction with Google Alerts to keep track of your market by keyword phrases. If you want to go ninja with this method, you can grab the RSS feed of Google news per key-term and import it to Google reader. But you can’t go wrong with these tools.
• Google Trends: Google trends is an absolutely amazing tool that allows you to see the trends in any market. If you track the shopping industry with Google trends you can see the seasonality easily. You can try it for any market, and it gives you a lot of information about the viability of your market.
• eBay Pulse: eBay pulse allows you to keep a tab on the pulse of eBay market. You can figure out the hottest items, the items that people are searching for, and much more. You can easily draw conclusions if you gather enough data from eBay pulse.
• Ninja tools: there are a few ninja tools that not many affiliates use but are extremely powerful tools that can expose your competitors and the markets that they are targeting. One of these tools is SpyFu. SpyFu allows you to figure out the top advertisers, their ads, top keywords, organic and paid search movers, and much more. The information you can gather from such tools is simply incredible.
• Market Sources: last but not the least you should keep an eye out on Jupiter Research, Forrester, and comScore. These guys make a living out of keeping an eye on thousands of markets, and there is no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of data gathered by these folks,

Gathering data about your market may look daunting at first, but it is not really that complicated. It is time-consuming however. In addition, you should avoid the temptation of hypothesizing before having enough information to back it up. But if you use all these resources in conjunction, you will have enough data to draw powerful conclusions that can move your affiliate business to the next level.

The Immediate Edge Affiliate Training Program

I mentioned a couple of days ago on SEO ABC that the Immediate Edge is now going 2.0 as Dan and Ed take on FaceBook, Google Slap, and other new developments in the interenet marketing world. The immediate edge is a pragmatic training program for affiliates, PPC marketers, and product owners. I have personally tested the immediate edge program, and the social media training available through this program is superb. I also like how Ed is honest about the nature of affiliate marketing, and how you should look beyond it to make money. There is an interesting video available on the immediate edge program sales letter that I encourage you to check out. In fact, you shouldn’t even consider trying the program without taking a look at the video by Ed first. It’s a quick video about how you should build your business about SEO, social media, Pay per click, and product launches.

Why Outsourcing Matters?

I had a post about outsourcing a few days ago, and how it can move you from being an ordianry affiliate making decent money to extraordinary masteraffiliate making possibly millions. The fact is as an affiliate marketer you only have 24 hours to accomplish so much. Even if you are very good at multitasking, you can’t beat a work of a team day in and day out. And even if you somehow manage to produce out-of-this-world results with your affiliate efforts, you are going to burn out very soon.

Outsourcing levels the playing field in the affiliate marketing industry. You can hire people for as low as $8 to accomplish work that others charge more than $25 to $50 hours for. So you can essentially compete with more established companies by using a team of outsourcing partners. Outsourcing your non-core competency can help you achieve possibly 10 times more than you can by yourself, so I definitely recommend you take advantage of the following services:

• Rentacoder.com
• Guru.com
• elance.com
• oDesk.com

There are many pitfalls for people who begin the outsourcing process (I will go over them in future posts), but you should not let simple issues to keep you away from the ultimate goal: dominating your niche. Good luck!

Are You Going To SES Chicago?

I posted a note on SEOABC about the Search Engine Strategies event that is going to happen in Chicago, this December. The Search Engine Strategies make look like an event that is only helpful to search engine optimization guys, but I have personally gotten more than a few ideas from my last trip to SES (New York). I was bummed when I was told that the tickets were out, so I had to settle for a Hall Pass, but even with my free pass, I got to meet a lot of good companies and network. It’s not everyday that you get to talk to people from Ask, Yahoo!, and Google. I personally recommend you attend at least one SES a year, even if you are not into search engine optimization. It’s always good to know what’s going on in the industry, and who hates learning how to generate free traffic.

P.S. drop me a note if you want to connect there.

What Expenses Should You Look Out For Before Starting Your Affiliate Business?

Affiliate marketing is real business, and like any real business, you need to account for business expenses in order to be prepared to run your business more effectively. Some expenses are straightforward, but it is surprising how affiliate marketers fail to account for some the most obvious expenses in advance. Here are the expenses that I think you should take into account for your business in order to avoid a major surprise:

• Necessities: I highly recommend using a separate computer for your affiliate business. You may even need to get a laptop if you plan to run a mobile business (on the go!). Necessities include computers, compter peripherals, phone lines, and even notebooks.
• Hosting and Domain Registration: you should also account for monthly and annual costs associated with hosting services and domain registration services. While these may not sink your ship if you don’t account for them, they are still a big part of your business.
• Tools: as a part of affiliate marketing, you should tools such as WordTracker, Wordze, SpyFu, and other tools to get a competitive edge in your niche. These tools can be very costly, so you will definitely notice the money deducted from your balance at the end of each months.
• Office Space: I know a lot of people work from home when they go full time with affiliate marketing. But I do recommend you getting an office space to get out of your house once in a while and have a feeling of going to a real job. While that is certainly not a pleasant feeling when you work for somebody else, but if you work for yourself then you shouldn’t have any problem with that.
• Advertising Costs: whether you are planning to only use pay per click advertising or you want to try media advertising, you should have a good estimate for how much you are prepared to spend on advertising.
• Training Seminars, Conferences, and Products: this is pretty self-explanatory. If you want to stay at the top of your market, you may want to try going to different conferences or try top products in your market. It will be expensive, but the networking that you get in some of these events is priceless.
• Group Subscription Fees: one of my favorite subscription services is SEOmoz. It is simply a must have for any SEO professional. Depending on your market, you will have similar subscription services in your market. I recommend you sign up for them to get a sense where your market is heading to and get the latest information about your market.

There are many other expenses to name here, but you should definitely run a comprehensive forecast to see which ones you can afford, and which ones can wait. It’s simply not possible to have everything when you start, but as you make money you can buy more things for your business. Good luck!