Stubborn Affiliate?
Are you one? I used to be one. Maybe still am in some ways. Affiliate marketers are often entrepreneurs with big dreams. They don’t want to just make money. They strive to be stars. They want to achieve great things. But we affiliates often get to attached to our work. You spend hours setting up your campaigns, writing articles, socializing online, and doing all kinds of things to drive traffic to your affiliate offers. You sort of forget when to quit. You keep piling on hoping that the law of averages will work in your favor.
Getting too attached to your work is nothing to be ashamed about. Some of the best entrepreneurs around the world do it. But a billionaire has much more money to throw at problems. And they don’t put all their eggs in one basket. One thing that doesn’t work in the affiliate marketing industry is prayer. In other words, don’t expect your offers to convert better without you changing things around. If you keep testing and see no real conversion improvements, then it’s time to let your baby go. There is no guarantee that you will ever make a dime from a lousy offer no matter how much money you throw at it.
The effort that you put in towards creating a campaign around a lousy offer is a sunk cost. You can keep thinking about your efforts and trying not to let go. But at the end of the day, lousy offers bring you only heartache. Making money in the affiliate marketing is not a right. You are not entitled to it unless you work hard and let go of bad relationships! I was too stubborn to realize that a few years ago. Are you?
Are You Stuck In Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a wonderful career to pursue, but it is certainly not as easy as some folks want you to believe. Like any other business, there will be times that you would want to pull your hair out. There will be times that nothing you do works, and the temptation of getting a steady check drives a lot of newbie affiliate marketers back to work.
I remember being in that situation a long time ago. I wanted to succeed but I always thought that if I didn’t, there will always be other opportunities. That is really the wrong approach. If your back is not against the wall, you may not do what is necessary to succeed online. Not only that, you may not want to change your old habits until you have to.
It’s always good to reevaluate your plans before going bankrupt 
I remember being stubborn and sticking with my ways, hoping for money to come out of nowhere. But in reality, you should constantly reevaluate what you are doing, and how you can change your fortunes online. It’s good to be resilient but do yourself favor and go back to work if you are not ready to change your ways. As a marketer, being stuck is not a good feeling.
Should You Only Promote High Commission Products?
That’s what people ask me all the time. If you have been involved in the affiliate industry with some success, you probably have a gauge on what works and what doesn’t at this point. But a lot of newbie marketers have trouble choosing the right affiliate product to promote.
It’s true that you should try to find products that provide the best value to your leads. But in reality, you should keep an eye on the amount of money you can make per sale as well. You should always try to figure out how you are going to promote a product and how much it may cost you. By testing out different products, you can find out which ones convert the best, and which ones actually help you earn some money.
Most affiliates use pay per click marketing to promote products. If you choose a product that pays you only $5 per sale, and you spend $50 to get your first sale, that probably wouldn’t be a good product to promote.
You should also be careful about the price of the product that you are planning to promote. If you decide to promote high end products, you may have to put more effort towards getting conversions. A $497 product is certainly much tougher to sell than a $5 product, wouldn’t you say?
At the end of the day, you should always test offers to find out which ones work for your business the best. Internet marketing is not about having it easy. Those who work hard and approach the game as a science stand a better chance of succeeding online. It’s as simple as that!
Does 100% Commission Make Sense?
If you have been promoting affiliate products for a while, you have probably seen them — products that allow you to earn 100% commission per sale. But 100% products do not have that great of a reputation in the affiliate marketing industry. In fact, a lot of folks try to stay away from these products, having assumed that they would not be worth the effort.
The perception here is that if the product creator is giving away all her profits to her affiliates, then the product may not be of high quality. But in reality, there are more ways to get some value from a product than just cash. A lot of folks create these products full of their own affiliate links, and they give it for free or close to that. But giving away a product for free may not be the best way to go. Why not use the efforts of others to push your supposedly free product?
Just because a product maker is giving away 100% commission on a product doesn’t mean that product is not of high quality. You should always try to push high quality products to your leads, whether you are getting 10% or 100% commission (as long as the money makes sense). The product maker may be looking for other things than cash (e.g. exposure, branding, traffic, …). Don’t ever assume what a product offers before actually trying it!
My Experience With Hydra Network
CPA offers are very attractive to most affiliates. You get all kinds of offers from these networks, and sometimes all you have to do is get people to enter their age and e-mail address to get your commission. Now there are simple CPA offers and complicated ones. The more complicated the action is, you can expect to get paid more. At least, the reasonable offers follow that trend. I decided a few months ago to get my hands wet with a new network after getting tired of playing with Azoogle.
I tried a bunch of CPA offer networks (e.g. Adfish), but so far Hydra is my favorite network. Here is why I recommend Hydra CPA offers:
- International Reach: hydra has offers for both U.S. and UK affiliates. Not bad if you want to go international.
- Offers: I got to admit that I have been impressed with the number of new and exclusive offers from Hydra network. There are just so many offers to choose from so don’t get overwhelmed if you want to give these guys a try.
- Interface: I don’t know about you, but Hydra has the most intuitive interface among CPA networks that I have seen. I could be biased here though.
- Prizes: got to love affiliate networks that send you goodies when you hit a certain mark in a month or a year. Hydra prizes are simply too attractive for anyone to look away! But it won’t be easy to get them
- Payments: my payments came on time, and that is great. After having to wait months to get payments from some other affiliate networks, it’s refreshing to see Hydra paying me for my hard work fast.
- Support: this is the best part. You get an account representative with Hydra, and these guys send you best CPA offers and conversion tips. Always helps to get someone else’s perspective on your future campaign.
Your take: what’s your favorite CPA network? Why?
What Does Your Link Say About You?
In the past few months, I have talked about how you should always try to hide your affiliate links. There is no shame in having affiliate links on your site, but leaving your links on your page can turn a few people off, and it that’s not bad, you can give a lot of information about what you are promoting and who you are working with by leaving your affiliate links uncloaked.
Let’s say you are working with Commission Junction. You probably work with a bunch of merchants and display their products on your blog or site. Here is how your signature link will look like (uncloaked):
Obviously, you can tell that I haven’t shown you the whole thing (I had to hide my own affiliate ID). Now, when I come to your site and see your affiliate link exposed like that, I immediately think of four things:
- You don’t know what you are doing and are hoping to make a few bucks without doing your homework
- You want me to promote the product you are promoting too.
- You want me to be able to search the web to find out what you have been doing.
- You just don’t care.
None of the above items are really a positive for you. And let’s not forget that a lot of folks avoid clicking on links that look suspicious, and that thing up there darn sure looks suspicious. Cloaking affiliate links is not very hard, so why leave anything to chance?
LinkShare Joins the Wordpress Revolution
Wordpress revolution keeps going as LinkShare has jumped on the bandwagon by coming up with its own Wordpress plug-in. The folks at LinkShare are not dumb. They understand that many affiliates are using Wordpress to build their affiliate sites, and you can bet LinkShare wants a piece of that pie.
All you need to do is download the Wordpress plugin, activate it, and use the token given to you by LinkShare to take advantage of their service. Now, I got to say that I don’t do much business with LinkShare these days, but this plug-in is going to make it much easier for anyone who does work with them to input put affiliate products up (you can create deep links too). I am glad that LinkShare’s new direction includes taking advantage of new technologies to help affiliates have an easier time promoting products.
What’s been your experience with LinkShare plug-in?
Did you miss Affiliate Summit 09?
Affiliate summit is one of my favorite events every year. I always try to make myself go to Vegas to take advantage of AS and the networking opportunities that it presents. Well, I couldn’t go this year for various reasons, but thanks to Ustream you can now watch parts of this great show. Don’t miss Gary V
Catch Affiliate Summit 09 recording here.
How I can Unhide your Hidden Affiliate Links…
Hiding your affiliate links? That’s what experts tell you, right? After all, you wouldn’t want folks like me to hijack your commission. In truth, there are multiple ways to hijack others commission, which I find unethical and just plain wrong. But there are affiliate out there who wouldn’t feel an ounce for you and your business and go on to take your money anyway. Believe it or not, hiding links is more than just protecting your commission checks. You also want to protect your market as much as possible.
A lot of affiliates use Clickbank products to make a living. But if you leave Clickbank links on your pages, anybody who has an IQ of 10 or more can grab your link, insert their own username, and start a campaign on a product that you have done considerable amount of research to find. I don’t know about you, but I put a lot of time to find products that convert well. For me to come out and tell you what works is like saying that I am not interested in paying my mortgage anymore.
Leaving your affiliate username for others to find can lead them to your other campaigns as well. Let’s say you are promoting 10 Clickbank products, and you are not hiding your links at all. You are basically telling others that it’s OK for them to figure out what exactly you are promoting. And let’s not forget that you can be slapped by Google if you have too many “naked affiliate links” on your website.
Even if you use link masking products to hide your links, I can still gather competitive intelligence info on you and your business. Some link masking solutions leave the word “affiliate” in the URL. Not very smart, right? But not too many folks bother to check the details before paying up for these solutions.
In all my years of being involved in the affiliate marketing business, I can only recall a handful of times that I have failed to identify an affiliate link from just a normal redirect. If you use TinyURL or BudURL, you are going to make my job a bit harder, but I’ll still find what you are doing. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it hard for me.
Your Thoughts: what’s your favorite link masking solution?
Affiliate Marketing vs. Product Launch
Affiliate marketing is a rewarding business. After all, you get to set your own schedule and make a limitless amount of money promoting others’ products. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about fulfilling or responding to customers’ question. But here is the thing. Most affiliate marketers often end up making their own products. In reality, an affiliate marketer is a freelance marketing executive. You get to promote products based on a set of rules put forth by the merchants, and you don’t have to show up for work everyday. If you don’t deliver leads, you won’t get paid unlike employees, and you are not covered by the merchants’ health insurance programs. Still sounds like a job to me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love affiliate marketing, and I think it is a wonderful career to pursue. But, I’d rather be the rule maker than follower. That’s why most top affiliates make the transition to the other side and start their very own affiliate programs and push their own products. There is simply more money in owning your product than just being an affiliate.
I’d like to consider affiliate marketing as a test. If you can pass the test with flying colors and promote others’ products, chances are that you are going to have success pushing your own creation. And let’s not forget that you are going to learn product launch techniques from super-affiliates in the process. I know a lot of folks claim that they intend to stay affiliate marketers for life, but in reality, most folks who are somebody these days have their own products. As much as I’d love to think that pulling in 7 figures every year is easy as an affiliate, it really isn’t. But having your own product opens many doors for you (JVs, recognition, …) which makes it that much easier to pull that kind of money in on an annual basis.
What do you think? Are you an affiliate marketer for life?