Amazon Affiliates and Free Search Results
Affiliate marketing is one of the most interesting businesses to be involved in. One day you could be on the top of the world. But things could change very quickly the very next day. The way states are going after affiliates with Internet tax, you could certainly see affiliates suffering and small businesses that are using this model to stay afloat closing their doors. But if you thought that was bad, wait till you see what Amazon seems to be planning for its own affiliate program. The company owns one of the most profitable affiliate programs on the market, but it seems it’s not profitable enough. At least not in the UK and CA:
In addition, as of February 1, 2010 we will no longer pay referral fees on purchases made by customers who are referred to http://www.amazon.co.uk or http://www.javari.co.uk via Free Search Results. Free Search Results are links containing an Associate’s tag displayed in a search engine’s free, natural, or organic search results in response to a search query which send customers directly to an Amazon site without the customer first being sent to an Associate’s site and the customer clicking on a link to arrive at the Amazon site.
So why is this bad news? You may ask yourself, how can you even show up in the SERPs with only your URL. Believe it or not that’s possible and is a tactic used by super affiliates to make money on a daily basis. It’s a fairly short-term strategy, but if your URL happens to show up in the SERPs, you can earn a whole lot of money in a fairly short period of time. But Amazon is cracking on that practice, and in the process penalizing folks who don’t intentionally optimize their links to rank higher in the SERPs.
Affiliate Management: Ways To Go
Not all affiliate managers are the same. I admit that there are a few that take the time to work with affiliates and genuinely want to help them achieve more from their campaigns. But laziness has become a norm in the affiliate industry. Some affiliate managers don’t respond to affiliates e-mails even when they are not too busy. They just don’t check their e-mails more than once a week. There are others who go further and don’t pay their affiliates on time. You want to know the worst kind? Those who slack off for 20 days a month and then rush things through in the remaining days (often making mistakes along the way).
You can have all the certifications and knowledge in the world. If you don’t take time to improve your performance in your job, then you are not doing yourself or your company a favor. I admit that affiliate program managers are often underpaid. After all, while they do manage affiliates, they are not seen as those who directly contribute to the bottom-line (which is somewhat untrue). Top affiliate managers can actually help companies make more money by engaging affiliates, establishing relationships with them, and partnering up with those who have not taken the time to become an affiliate.
Don’t Let Refunds To Discourage You
New affiliate marketers are always more jumpy and sensitive to everything that happens to their business. I have seen so many affiliates that get discouraged when Google slaps their pages and asks them for more money to keep their pages on the first page. A lot of it is due to people setting unreasonable expectations for themselves and their business. It’s true that there are a lot of people who are making a killing with affiliate products. These folks have mastered the art of Google Adwords and affiliate marketing and have developed a well tuned system that keeps making them money in the most difficult times. Newbie affiliates don’t have that luxury.
One of the biggest steps in running a business is planning. Planning on how you are going to make money. How you are going to promote your business? What tactics you are going to use to make money online? What does it take to break even? These are things that master affiliate marketers take into account. Let’s say you have made a killing in a month. Do go on spending all the revenue you have earned on things before accounting for refunds and other miscellaneous fees. Those who have been in business long do have a sense for refund rates, so they do account for that when preparing their break-even analysis. (more…)
5 Ways To Expand Your Affiliate Business in 2010
The new year is finally here, and yet another cycle begins for us affiliate marketers. If you think about it, affiliate marketers don’t really have off days. We are going to have slow days and weeks depending on the niche we are in, but you can’t take Christmas or the New Year’s day off if those are the days your target shoppers are out there shopping. If you have time to take off, you have time to invest more efforts in your business. Now I am not suggesting that you should never take off or have fun when you are running a business. But affiliate marketing is all about being at the top of your game when your target audience is ready to spend.
The holiday season may be over, and many affiliates are already evaluating and implementing new plans for the new year. Some of the things you can do are obviously niche specific. But there are general things you can do to improve your affiliate business in 2010. Here are 5 ways how:
- Conquer Social Media: social media is here to say. If you haven’t taken time to create a social media presence for your affiliate portal or reach out to your target audience on Twitter and Facebook, the time is now. You don’t want to spam those people, but you want to use the tools available to build a solid relationship with them. The time for reading social media books is over. It’s time to act.
- New Markets: the new year’s day is always my favorite time of the year. It’s usually the day I go over the markets I targeted in the previous year and the niches I want to target in the new year. I am not suggesting that I go about the process in one day. But my New Year’s day is more relaxed and great for brainstorming and identifying a broad set of niches to target in the new year. (more…)
The Truth About Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals
These holiday times are some of the best times to be an affiliate. If you have ever dreamed of making money online, there is no better way to do it than now. Many merchants are cutting prices on most popular products, so there is no excuse in not selling these days. But you want to make sure you don’t ruin your credibility by cutting corners. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are days that people rush to stores to pick up gadgets and necessities and save money in the process. What they do expect to get from your site is a) places they can buy the items they want for the lowest price b) promotions they may have missed c) gift ideas for the holiday season.
There are a lot of affiliates that want to make the most money by putting the least effort forward. So essentially, they grab the feeds that are provided to them by the merchants and just slaps them on their pages without doing any research. A lot of merchants are known for combining good deals with bad ones. So while you are getting a very good deal on some of their items, you may be getting no so good ones with the others. But if you slap all their deals on your pages without comparing prices, then you are not exactly providing real value to your users. (more…)
Affiliates and The Art of Fear Mongering
You know what makes super marketers good at what they do? A lot of them don’t hesitate to take advantage of their prospects’ emotions to sell them things. Whether you feel sad, insecure, depressed, or afraid of something, the fact that you feel those emotions makes you susceptible to some of the tactics used by affiliate marketers. Super affiliates don’t even hesitate to go after fellow affiliates, and you can easily see that these days with the FTC rules going into the effect on December 1st. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I have received from people who are just trying to help me out and keep me out of jail (by selling me a bunch of legal documents for $197).
That’s the classic method of spinning a bad news to your advantage to make some quick bucks. The FTC has come up with a vague set of rules that could potentially get a lot of affiliates and bloggers in trouble. People don’t like to be threatened with an $11,00o penalty per violation, which means many are looking for ways to protect themselves against any possible liabilities. Of course, not everyone can afford a lawyer, which is exactly the reason why promoting a $197 product in front of these folks makes sense. (more…)
The FTC Does Affiliates a Favor
There have been a lot of talks and rants about how the FTC overstepped its boundaries. There is no question the new FTC rulings could lead to some sites being targeted while others spared with no specific reason. The ruling is comprehensive and vague at the same time (if that is possible). The FTC talks about how everyone needs to be transparent online and disclose monetary and other types of gains on blogs, affiliate sites, and portals. But the FTC may have given affiliates even more ways to make money online by keeping things as vague as possible. Right after the FTC released its ruling on affiliates and bloggers, many smart online marketers started creating products to market to other affiliates who are hoping to stay compliant with the FTC guidelines.
Think about it. There are going to be a lot of newbie affiliate marketers out there who have no idea what they are doing and will part ways with their hard earned money to stay in the good graces of the FTC. Even blackhat marketers have taken advantage of this opportunity as well. Some people are selling compliance badges to people who are trusting enough to buy them, thinking that the FTC will pass on their sites as long as they have badges all over them. (more…)
FTC To Affiliates: Disclose or Else
In case you have missed the latest uproar that the FTC has caused among affiliates and bloggers, the FTC is planning on putting hefty fines on marketers who fail to disclose their relationship with advertisers. The FTC has targeted the blogging community by encouraging the independent bloggers to disclose what they have gotten for free or face hefty fines. So it’s all about transparency.
I have to say I was a bit surprised by the FTC going after the blogging community, but if you think about it, it is really going after affiliate marketers and those who get under table benefits from advertisers. For years, affiliate marketers have promoted things they have not tested only to increase their bottom line. In addition, affiliate marketers often use the trust they have built with their leads to promote all kinds of offers to them without disclosing what they are getting for the money. Think about it. How many times have you sent or received an e-mail that talks about how a product is going to change somebody’s life, and how people should get that product? Now can you remember disclosing what you are getting paid for promoting that product? Has anyone ever told you they are getting paid for recommending a product?
I am a believer in the free market. And I do believe that the consumer market is capable of fixing itself as well. In essence, if you are a top affiliate, and you recommend a product that is sub par, you are going to lose your trust capital in the process. But the FTC is not having any of that. If your customers/leads know all the fact, it’d be harder for them to claim that they didn’t know you were getting paid for promoting a product. That’s why the FTC is going after bloggers and social media affiliates. (more…)
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…)