3 Killer Affiliate Keyword Research Tools You Must Try
If you have been involved in the affiliate marketing industry for a while, you know the importance of choosing the right keywords to target your prospects. Not all keyword phrases are created equal. Some are capable of making you a lot of money, while there are others that could cause you a big headache and baffle you on their performance. What sets apart top affiliates from rest is not only just the strategies used but also the affiliate tools and how they are used to develop more optimized campaigns. A lot of newbie affiliates use those free tools on the market to set up their affiliate campaigns. That may work for a while, but if you intend to build a real business around your affiliate efforts, you are going to spend money to earn money.
There are plenty of tools that you can choose from to get your keyword research done properly. Affiliates have been using WordTracker, Keyword Discover, and Wordze in the past to develop their affiliate campaigns. These tools are nice on the surface, but they don’t provide you with affiliate specific information. There are keyword tools out there that not only help you build up your affiliate lists, but they also help you find out what other affiliates are doing and whether you should go after a specific keyword. If that is what you are looking for, here are 3 killer affiliate tools you should try:
Keyword Spy: my favorite affiliate keyword research tool. It’s one of the best tools on the market for pay per click affiliate marketers. The tool shows you how much competition you are going to face per each keyword and how much you may have to pay to achieve results with your pay per click marketing campaigns.
Keyword Country: this tool is the prime example of a keyword research tool that has something for everyone. Whether you are an Adsense marketer or just want to start a profitable affiliate marketing campaign on Google Adwords, Keyword Country has something for you. Great tool for bloggers as well.
Affiliate Marketing and Transparency
The issue of transparency is one of the biggest issues in the affiliate marketing world. The FTC has been clear about what it needs affiliates to disclose to make sure the consumers have all the facts at hand. But it has also left a lot of wiggle room for many affiliate marketers. In fact, for months, marketers had no idea what the FTC wanted them to disclose. In truth, there is no one rule fits all when it comes to affiliate marketing. There are plenty of ways to make money from affiliate marketing. You can embed affiliate links in your blog posts or spend money sending traffic to your affiliate landing page. You can treat these situations the same way.
Why does transparency matter? You may think that people are more likely to buy from you if they don’t know about your association with a certain company. In fact, research has shown that a certain group of consumers will not buy using your link no matter how much value you provide to them. But it has also been proven that disclosing your associations on your blog is the best way to go. It’s always easy to slap a piece of content together and use cloaking services to hide your track. But that’s really insulting your audience’s intelligence. Today’s readers are more sophisticated when it comes to web technologies, and they can guess what you are doing and why you are doing it. Let’s not forget that not disclosing your associations could always leave you open to legal liability.
Many affiliate programs have also started to introduce transparency rules to cover their legal liabilities. A lot of affiliate marketers are targeting Twitter to make money online. These folks use services such as bit.ly to shorten their URLs. That hasn’t gone down well with tweeters and with affiliate program managers. A lot of companies now require their affiliates to use the full affiliate URL when possible. Considering that you get only 140 characters on Twitter, it’s going to be difficult to follow that rule. But since a lot of people are spamming Twitter with all kinds of affiliate offers, this seems to be the right decision. (more…)
Data vs. Information Affiliate Sites: Which way to go
There are a lot of ways to make online from affiliate marketing. You can always try CPA offers and play the PPC game. You can play the social media game and build killer apps for Facebook and Twitter and push affiliate products in the process. Or you can just focus on building portals and make money online that way. Portal building is one of the oldest ways to make money online. The whole portal development field has been around for years but a few years ago, people started realize the power of building a huge portal and optimizing for every keyword under the sun.
I remember watching a review from a conference in 2003 about how you can make money online with portal development. The person who was doing the presentation claimed at the time that he was making enough money from his website that he could quit his events and still have a comfortable life. That strategy may not be as novel as it used to be, and it may take a lot of work, but it can still be done. With the explosion of the social media and search engines changing their indexes to provide more relevant results to their visitors, the opportunity is there for portal developers to make a killing online. (more…)
It’s Not All About Your Commission Rate
Everybody likes to earn more money. Whether you are a teacher, a cop, or even a CEO, you wouldn’t mind it if someone offered you more money to get your job done. The same concept applies to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers do not have the luxury of a stable income. So if you don’t perform as an affiliate, you are not going to get paid, and you might end up going out of business. Expert affiliate marketers understand how to get the best out of each affiliate program. They don’t necessarily go after the items with the highest commission rates. They focus on products that convert at a high rate. But that can’t be said about newbie affiliate marketers.
A lot of affiliate programs go about recruiting new affiliates by printing up these brochures that talk about how much money you are going to earn per click. The concept of EPC has been around for a while now, and a lot of people assume that an item that comes with a high average EPC is a winner. In truth, many affiliate programs do not remove outliers from their numbers, so you end up with an EPC that is bloated. EPC also doesn’t count the amount of money that you will have to spend to generate a valid lead. Many newbie affiliate marketers don’t take into account their overall CPA, and that could lead to your fast downfall.
I remember when I started with affiliate marketing. I didn’t know exactly what I needed to do, but I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. So I started going after products/services that gave me the largest amount of money per sale without figuring out whether I had a chance in making a profit with my campaigns. It’s true that mortgage companies are willing to pay you crazy amounts per each approved lead, but you are going to have to do a lot work to set up your campaigns in a profitable manner, and you will still be at the mercy of Google Adwords and other pay per click services. Besides, let’s not forget that those high-commission products are usually in mature markets, so you are going against people who have been in business for a while and are ahead of you on the curve. (more…)
