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…)
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.
Innovation is Key for Affiliates
A lot of affiliates are good at copying what others are doing to make money online. Affiliate marketing is a tough business, and what a better way than following the leaders and piggybacking on what they have done. There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of top online marketers you do that, and even they do it in their own business. But what you don’t want to be in the affiliate marketing world is a pure follower. There is a right way and wrong way to piggyback. If you are just borrowing other people’s strategy and just cloning their business strategies, you may see some short-term results, but you are not going to succeed on a long term basis. The person who’s concocted the strategy that you are borrowing is always going to have an edge over you as they know exactly where to take their business whereas you are just following.
Top affiliate marketers usually analyze other folks’ strategy and try to absorb the strengths and get rid of the weaknesses. Then they add their own innovations to make even more money online. You can be a follower, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you don’t have to follow someone all the way to the bank. You can always take a short-cut along the way or find better ways to proceed. Top marketers do a little bit of both. They have the luxury of knowing other top marketers. These folks are super networkers, so when they borrow strategies from others, they do so from the cream of the crop. Even then, a lot of these folks take time to analyze what they are borrowing and how they can improve upon it.
Top affiliate marketers also understand that there is more money in developing their own products than actually promoting what other people have made. When you are promoting other people’s products, you are only settling for a small percentage of the revenue. You can always promote ClickBank, and there is a lot of money to be earned there, but I personally prefer working on a real business strategy than looking for new ClickBank products to promote each and every week. ClickBank and other info products could be a part of your overall strategy but shouldn’t be the only thing you focus on. You can always try to sell your own info product to find out what it takes to develop and launch a product.
At the end of the day, you want to think outside the box and come up with your very own strategies to promote products and take your business to the next level. Affiliate marketing is not the be all end all when it comes to making money online. I’d like to think it as a training ground for folks who want to own their own products and grow their companies on a consistent basis. The commission checks can be great, but it’s much tougher to make it as a millionaire as a pure affiliate marketer than it is by having your own products and services. If you don’t like risking too much, you can’t expect high rewards, now can you?
4 Camcorders To Get Started With Affiliate Videos
Traditional affiliate marketing tactics may still work these days, but there is no question that the emergence of video marketing has opened new doors for online marketers. And unlike a few years ago, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get your hands on a camcorder that allows you to take videos whether you are at your office or on the go. HD mini camcorders are great to record affiliate training videos or product reviews online, and they are very convenient to take with you when you are on the go.
Here are top 4 recent mini camcorders that affiliate marketers can use to start with their affiliate videos:
Sony Webbie HD: Sony Webbie MHS-PM1 HD Camcorder is a decent HD camcorder for vloggers and people on the go.
Flip UltraHD: the Flip needs no introduction. It has been around for years and is great for vlogging.
Kodak Zx1 HD: An affordable mini HD Camcorder for those constantly on the go.
Creative Labs Vado HD Camcorder: Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom is another pocket HD camcorder for those who live a mobile life.
You don’t have to a millionaire to get started with affiliate marketing or upgrade your old equipment. All you have to do is spend about $200 in your business. The quality of these camcorders may not be as high as a $20,000 professional camcorder, but they get the job done. These gadgets give you the most affordable way to take your affiliate business to the next level.
Flip Mino HD: An Affiliate’s Best Friend
Affiliate marketing is a very competitive business. If you intend to keep making money in the affiliate marketing industry, you’ve got to take time to learn new tricks and innovate yourself and your campaigns to make more money. One of the best ways to innovate your campaigns is by adding videos to increase your sales. Video blogging is one the rise, and it is no longer something only early adopters do. Most bloggers, affiliate marketers, and industry experts have started their vlogs. Video can help you increase your sales dramatically in more ways than one. For starters, prospects seem to eat up great video content. If you are planning to sell a product, you can do a video review on it. If you plan to sell a service, you can provide free video tips. As long as you don’t ramble on, provide real value, and sell your product in your videos, you can expect to convert more folks.
A few years ago, it wasn’t really possible to create videos without having to spend $500-$1000 on a camcorder. Not everyone afforded that kind of money and cheap camcorders were not exactly great for creating affiliate videos. But devices such as Flip Mino have made it extremely easy to shoot affiliate videos fast. Flip Mino HD is designed for video-bloggers. It’s a portable mini camcorder that allows you to shoot decent quality videos without having to break the bank (see a preview here).
What I like about Flip Mino HD is that you don’t have to read a 200 page manual to get a handle of this gadget. It’s so easy even a caveman can do it. All you have to do is press the record button and keep the camcorder steady. Once you have recorded your videos, you can use the USB feature to upload them to your computer and use FlipShare software to put your videos on YouTube. If you can afford to host your own videos, that’s even better. But the moral of story is, you don’t have to be a rich affiliate to make videos when you can buy Flip Video MinoHD for about $200. And the SEO benefits that you get by putting videos online is going to make it all worth your while. Affiliate videos are not the only thing you need to concentrate on, but it’s a great way to compliment your campaigns in other channels and bring down your overall CPA.
Promote Your Affiliate Content With Market Samurai
If you have been paying attention to the online marketing industry in the past few months, there is a good chance you have heard of Market Samurai. I was personally introduced to Market Samurai through the Immediate Edge. At the time, I was using WordTracker and Google Keyword tool to find niches and do my market research. But affiliate marketing can be tough if you do these things by hand. There is no reason you should spend more time than you have to get your research process done. Market Samurai does all the research process for you and more. But what I was impressed about was how you could use it to find backlinks to your affiliate sites. We are not talking about any backlink but the “do follow” ones.
Here is how it works. Once you have identified a core keyword for your market, it’s time to get down and do some research to find places you get links from to your blog or affiliate website. Market Samurai has a buit-in system that lets you find juicy sites fast.
You can find related pages on hubpages, Squidoo, Weebly, and forums in your niche. This is not something that can’t be done by hand. But think about it. How much time would you have to spend to find places you can post your link and get involved to drive traffic back to your affiliate website.
Now here is the killer part. You can sort through these sites based on their Page-Rank, Follow-No follow attribute, and even the number of backlinks to them. If you are planning to move your site to the top of the search engines, getting links (tons of them) is one of the best way to go. With Market Samurai, you won’t even have to make more than 2 clicks to get all this data. That’s what I call proper outsourcing. And best of all, there is no human error involved.
Stay tuned for a more comprehensive Market Samurai review!
AffiliateReport.com Review
Affiliate marketing is a game of numbers. Every guru would tell you that. No matter how good your landing pages are or how much traffic you are driving to your website, if you are not constantly monitoring your numbers and improving every aspect of your website, you can’t expect to make any real money online. If you have been in the affiliate business for a while, chances are you are already using pay per click marketing to drive leads to your website. Any PPC marketer knows that the goal is stay ahead of the engines to keep your quality score high and your minimum bids low. And it helps if you could bring up your conversion rate. You need to do all that plus work with affiliate programs that you are associated with. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an integrated software solution that allowed you to get more out of your campaigns? AffiliateReporting.com is an online service that allows you to increase your ROI and get more from your affiliate programs.
If you need a dashboard that aggregates data from all sources and gives you a better overall view of your campaigns, AffiliateReporting has a solution for you. AffiliateReporting provides you with:
- Aggregate Commission Data: CJ, Linkshare, Performics (Google Affiliate Network), ShareASale, PepperJam Network, ClickBank, PartnerFusion, Converseon, Kowabunga are all included in Affiliatereporting.com. I don’t know about you, but tracking these networks’ numbers on an individual basis is not the best way to track your progress as an affiliate.
- PPC Cost Data: AffiliateReporting.com allows you to aggregate your cost data from top search engines such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.
- ROI Analysis: ROI should not be the only metric that you are concerned about, but it’s a very significant metric. With AffiliateReporting, you get sophisticated ROI reports without having to do all the hard spreadsheet work. Saves a lot of time.
- Alarm system: you also get an alarm system that notifies you if there are problems with your campaigns. If you are a busy affiliate like me, you’d appreciate this feature.
- Search Engine Management: wouldn’t it be nice if you could create multiple campaigns on top search engines at once? You can do it all with AffiliateReporting.com. And there is a bid management tool integrated into this system as well. So, if you have trouble optimizing your bids, you can always use the bid management software to keep you on track.
- Deep Reports: Not only you get top level reports on AffiliateReporting.com, you also get deep keyword, ad, and adgroup level reports from the system. The more numbers you can look at, the better, more knowledgeable decision you can make.
AffiliateReporting is not for everyone. It’s a sophisticated solution that costs a lot of money and is designed only for super-affiliates. The minimum fee you’ll have to pay is $500, and 2% of your ad spends are added to your monthly bill. If you are making lots of money in this business, you are going to save a lot of time and money, offsetting the fee. But if you are a newbie, you may want to stay away until you have enough revenue to justify purchasing this package.
Affiliate Elite & 2009
Boy oh boy times have changed. New affiliate marketers have no idea what it took to actually make it in the affiliate marketing world. A few years ago, there weren’t many tools available for affiliate marketers, and those tools that were available were selling for hundreds of $$$. But times have changed. There are so many software packages available for affiliates to become more efficient with their daily operations. I have personally used Affiliate Elite for quite some time. When I got hooked on Affiliate Elite, it was selling for a lot of money. But now folks get to try it for $5, and it has become so affordable that anybody can afford it.
The same can be said about other tools in the affiliate marketing world. It’s not to say that all affiliate tools come cheap, but a lot of them do, and newbie affiliate marketers don’t have to do everything by hand. Talk about a year to get into this business. If you haven’t started in the affiliate marketing world, you probably should as soon as possible. There is no better time to get started.
What is Affilorama – Learn Affiliate Marketing and Making Money from Pros
I don’t know if you have been paying attention, but Affilorama has quickly become the talk of town in the affiliate marketing world. So I decided to sit down and figure out why these are being talked about all over the Internet. AffiloRama is a community of affiliate marketers who are out there to teach beginner affiliates how to start a start, how to market it, and how to actually go about making a sale.
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
Affilorama has a lot of stuff for new affiliates. If you look at it, it’s very smart strategy. Folks are losing their jobs. Some are just tired of the whole 9-5 thing. Affiliate marketing is a tough business, but it allows you to set your own hours and make more money than ever before. So it’s smart on these guys’ part to target folks who are just getting started with affiliate marketing. They walk you through the basic of affiliate marketing to actually finding the right affiliate programs for your business.
You are going to learn how to build a site, choose a host, and choose the right software to optimize your site. In addition, Affilorama has a comprehensive section on creating content from PLR articles and other sources. They also talk about different content strategy that you can use to get some meat on your affiliate website.
Affiliate marketing for not so newbies:
I find the whole affiliate marketing for newbies pleasant. But I am not a beginner affiliate marketer, and with the buzz that Affilorama has generated throughout the WWW, I assume there are a lot of folks who are not beginners but are still getting some value from Affilorama. It turns out there is more than enough for intermediate and advanced affiliates to chew on Affilorama. Here are the areas covered in this community:
- Advanced PPC: that’s right. These guys show you how to do PPC right.
- Advanced SEO: advanced search engine optimization techniques, including link baiting and other link building techniques, are all covered on Affilorama.
- Advanced Blogging: there is a right way to blog, and there is a wrong way to blog. I am glad that these guys cover the former than the latter.
- Advanced Marketing: we are getting awfully in B-school territory here, but you are going to learn how to do proper market research
- Interviews: I don’t know about you, but I always learn a lot from other pros who talk about their experiences. Of course, they don’t share their deep dark secrets, but it’s still very motivating to hear from someone who’s making $200K a year.
The community comes with a bunch of premium tools for SEO and PPC that you can use for your campaigns. Some of the features are locked for premium members, but you are going to learn a lot from the free content available on Affilorama. You got to check it out.
Split Test Affiliate Programs With OpenX
I am sure by now you have heard the “drill baby, drill” chant that was used by Sarah Palin and John McCain during the general election. We affiliates have a slogan too! It’s “test baby, test!” That’s right. Testing is the best way to dig out the unhidden money out of your affiliate business. Now, I am sure most people have heard about the concept of A/B testing. PPC marketing professionals test their ads against each other long enough to find the best ad. Surprisingly, a lot of new affiliates do not do enough A/B testing on their affiliate offers, which means there is a good chance they are leaving money on the table.
When I started in the affiliate marketing field, I was flying blind. I didn’t do much testing. My goal was to make as much money as possible, and I was very optimistic about my chances. Obviously, thinking that you will convert is much different than actually converting. That’s why you should test different offers from different merchants in your niche to find out which merchant offer converts the best.
Depending on your site structure, you may have to use different tools to properly test among multiple affiliate offers. My sites are about 100% based on the Wordpress platform. I use Open X to test offers from various merchants on CJ and LinkShare. I run banners and text links in different locations and rotate my offers 50-50 to find out which one converts the best. In Adwords, you can find the winner ad after about 100 clicks, but I go with 200 clicks with my affiliate links.
You can do A/B testing with a simple PHP script, but OpenX is a highly sophisticated ad management system that can generate comprehensive analysis on your campaigns. Every week or so, I go through the information from OpenX reports to figure out which affiliate program is the winner. By keep testing between different offers, you can not only increase your conversion rate, but also focus your efforts on programs that provide you with the biggest bang for the buck.
Affiliate landing pages and offers change all the time, so you shouldn’t cross out an affiliate offer forever if it ends up in the loser column. You should be alert about the changes in affiliate programs in your niche and re-load offers that have been improved. So as you see things don’t stand still in the affiliate marketing world. You keep testing as long as you humanly can.
Once I have found the winning affiliate program, I use WP Affiliate to change all my text links to point to the winner affiliate offer. WP Affiliate is a premium wordpress plug-in that allows you to automatically make link out of words on your Wordpress site. For instance, with WP Affiliate you can define the phrase “offer x” to go to http://www.offerx.com throughout your blog. Now if it turns out that offery.com converts better, you can change all the links on your Wordpress site to point to the new page with a single click [Caution: you may want to use less specific anchor text for these links in order to avoid sending people to an unexpected landing page (e.g use Garmin 680 as your anchor text instead of Amazon Garmin 680). ].
You can see by now how powerful the combination of OpenX and WP Affiliate can be for your affiliate business. OpenX allows you to methodically test among different affiliate offers in your niche. WP Affiliate allows you to swap out the old links and insert the new links, fast! You can choose other tools if you prefer, but you should always test among different offers to put more cash in your pockets. Remember our slogan? Test baby, test!