Twitter Marketing Or Spamming?
Just like anything in marketing, there are multiple ways to look at Twitter and how one can take advantage of it to make more money online. Twitter marketing is nothing new. People have been taking advantage of Twitter to generate leads and make money from affiliate products for months now. Of course, just like anything else, you don’t hear about top Twitter marketing tactics until they are old. That’s really how marketing training courses have worked in the past, and this continues to be the case.
I would also blame fake Internet marketers that make a living on teaching people who to spam Twitter and make money that way. Don’t get me wrong. It IS possible to spam Twitter and make money for a short period of time. But sooner rather than later, you are going to get caught and all your efforts go to waste. (more…)
Conversion Tip: Seasonality Matters
When it comes to affiliate marketing, there are two ways to go about making money online. One way is to just follow what you have read in every book and go about promoting offers without looking at trends, seasons, and so on. You find a Clickbank product and promote it using Google Adwords and other top advertising services online. You could even build your own landing pages and optimize your conversions over time. The better way is to take advantage of the latest trends all around you to start and develop laser targeted campaigns for your prospects.
By watching the latest trends and analyzing the information you can get from Google Trends and Google Insights, you can do a better job finding products to promote and optimizing your campaigns. Think about it. Let’s say you are planning to start selling Amazon or eBay products. People are more likely to buy a heater during fall and winter thn a cooler or a lawn mower. These are simple concepts, but there are affiliates that don’t pay attention to them. If you have build a portal based on products from Amazon and eBay, you are better off putting the emphasis on promoting winter products during fall and winter than other seasons. That’s why top affiliates do make small changes to their portals to optimize for different periods of the year. (more…)
Affiliate Marketing and Social Media Spam
You don’t have to be a genius to realize that there is just too much value in the social media for affiliates not be involved in it. Web services such as Twitter and Facebook have enabled many marketers to come up with more innovative campaigns to make money online from affiliate products. But there is a right way and wrong way about making money online. There are plenty of Black Hat affiliates who use software automation to force their offers on Twitter and Facebook users. Let’s say you want to talk about web hosting on Twitter. You are likely to get a whole lot of messages pitching you web hosting services. Now that wouldn’t be an issue if a person was behind those messages. But in most cases, it’s a computer that is doing it. You can tell as these messages are always identical to each other.
If you have been on Twitter or Facebook for a while, there is a good chance you have gotten the above message. There are plenty of web hosting affiliates who are doing the same exact thing process using scripts that are available online. That’s not exactly how you should go about building your business with the social media.
Affiliates and Multiple Streams of Income – Part I: Blogging
If you are an experienced affiliate or just have been around for a while to test your own campaigns and optimize your own landing pages, you are familiar with how the game works. A lot of people assume that super affiliates keep making thousands of dollars each day. In reality, there are days that you can throw hundreds of dollars at your campaign without getting any real results. Depending on your niche, you may have some days that you have too much success and some other days that are losing money on your campaigns. Seasonality and cycles are a part of affiliate marketing business. Those who are new to the game are more likely to give up on their business after losing a few bucks. But those who have been around and experienced things will stick around and supplement their income with other streams of income.
Just because you are good at affiliate marketing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore other avenues to make money online. Many affiliate superstars have made a lot of money from blogging, and you can too. Let’s say your affiliate business is about anti-spam software. You have created a landing page comparing anti-spam software packages, and you are driving traffic to it from the social media, Google Adwords, your articles, and so on. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a blog about anti-spam software and dedicating a post per anti-spam software package? (more…)
MyArticleNetwork Review: Article Marketing For Affiliates
Affiliate marketers live and die by traffic. It’s really that simple. You can have the best site around and promote the best products on the market, but if you are not driving enough traffic to your landing pages, you are not going to earn enough commissions to stay in business. You can always use advanced pay per click marketing techniques to drive lots of traffic to your website, but that’s going to cost you money. You can always hedge your bets by focusing on a multi-channel strategy to drive traffic to your website and manage your cost per actions and EPC in the process. That’s where article marketing comes in. It’s one of the oldest methods to drive traffic to any website.
Article marketing is especially popular among affiliate marketers as it allows them to not only get targeted traffic from article networks, but it also helps them gain backlinks and get more free traffic from Google and other search engines. Article marketing has changed a lot in the past few years. With the introduction of blogs and blog networks, your articles can show up on more websites, and you can get more from each and every article (as long as they are high quality and contain valuable information). MyArticleNetwork is a cool article marketing service that lets you share your content on their blog network, without you having to wait for webmasters to pick up your articles. See the difference? Unlike EzineArticles, where you submit your articles and have to wait for others to pick your articles up, with MyArticleNetwork, all you have to do is submit your articles and wait for the network to distribute them.
Submitting an article to MyArticleNetwork is very easy. All you have to do is pick a category and the time that you want it to go live. You can then copy/past your articles and you are set. Keep in mind that you can include links inside the body of your articles. So you are going to get the full benefit of your links as they are posted on other blogs.
You’ve got to appreciate the useful tools that are included with this service as well. You can use the article spinner service provided to make your articles unique and avoid duplicate content issues. You can also track the progress of your articles overtime and find out how many times they have been posted and how many backlinks you have gotten from each article. Essentially, MyArticleNetwork is EzineArticles on steroids. You get to distribute your articles on other blogs but you don’t have the restrictions that you do with EzineArticles.
MyArticleNetwork is a premium service and will cost you a bit. But you do save a lot of time and effort in the process. Think of it as outsourcing your article distribution and promotion processes. If you are looking to incorporate article marketing into your affiliate plans, MyArticleNetwork is a good place to start.
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?
10 Affiliate Marketing Networks For Beginners
Many new affiliates have trouble finding products to promote. Believe me, I have been there and done that. When you are trying to find your feet in this business, you hear a lot of things from the gurus that don’t make sense. The problem is, a lot of these gurus have no idea how to convey information to beginners in this industry. A guru may be making millions of dollars from PayDotCom, but that doesn’t mean you can too. For example. a super affiliate who has 500,000 e-mail subscribers and a couple of products of her own can sell high-end products easier. After all, she can always give her own products for free in exchange for folks using her affiliate links to buy those $1997 or more affiliate products. A newbie may be great in SEO and all other technical things, but he/she is still going to struggle to sell those high-end products without a good bonus and a decent plan.
In reality, there are many networks that beginners and intermediate affiliate marketers can use to make money and take their game to the next level. There are many products out there, and as long as you find the right product in the right niche, and you know what you are doing, there is no reason you can’t make things happen. With that in mind, here are 10 networks that can help you get started with affiliate marketing fast:
- Amazon: Amazon’s Associates Program is still one of the best affiliate marketing programs out there. There is a lot of money to be earned here. And you won’t have trouble making people want to buy from Amazon.
- eBay Publisher Network: eBay’s affiliate program is another one of those programs that keeps making you money even if you don’t want to. It’s just not that hard.
- ClickBank: ClickBank is the place to grab digital products and promote them. Who doesn’t like getting 50% or more in commission?
- LinkShare: LinkShare is a great place to start for newbie affiliates. There are a lot of merchants available. LinkShare folks keep things simple too!
- PepperJam Network: this network is growing fast, it’s not even funny. You are going to have a lot of fun promoting some of these products.
- Hydra Network: Hydra Network is a great CPA network that makes it easy to earn money from sign ups and all kinds of actions.
- Google Network: Google Affiliate Network (Performics) is another great place to get started and make money online.
- ClixGalore: ClixGalore is another one of those CPA networks that helps you make money online fast!
- Shareasale: Shareasale is similar to LinkShare and CJ and provides you with lots of advertisers to work with.
- aZoogleAds: aZoogle Ads is a great place for sign ups and other cool CPA offers. There is a lot of money to be earned here, and these offers can keep you busy for a while.
As you can see, there are many places that you can look to find products to promote online. But you can have the best products at your disposal, but if you don’t promote them right, you are not going to make money. If you are not too advanced in this business, take your time and get the basics down. You don’t want to waste time searching for products when you don’t know how to properly promote them.
Your take: what’s your favorite affiliate network?
Commission Junction Bites The Bullet
Many of you know about the budget crisis that is going on in California. But no one is going to be affected more than affiliates once the latest tax bill gets approved. We all know what happened with Amazon and the state of New York. Commission Junction understands that there is a good chance this bill will go through. That’s why it has decided to let affiliates know about the impending doom:
As you may already know, there are proposed California bills that could require the collection of sales tax for online purchases similar to bills proposed in other states and that could resemble the law that recently passed in New York State. At this time, a hearing date for AB 178 has been set for April 13, 2009. As with all laws, if passed, these laws may or may not apply to you and your business.
Commission Junction is headquartered in California and impacted by the current California budget crisis. Nevertheless, we are opposed to the recently proposed legislation and are working with a lobbyist and other groups in hopes that we can influence the rejection of the bills’ passage. Rest assured, we recognize that our industry and many of our clients may be impacted by these bills.
The application of the bills is dependent on particular business and factual circumstances, and Commission Junction is not in a position to provide legal and tax advice regarding the bills. However, we encourage you to perform the appropriate due diligence as it relates to your business. You may be contacted by advertisers in the Commission Junction network as they perform their due diligence.
The culprit here is Nancy Skinner. She believes this bill will bring the much needed revenue to help California avoid bankruptcy:
During this unprecedented fiscal crisis we cannot afford to lose sales tax revenue from out-of-state companies when our own local businesses are struggling to keep their doors open.
So what can affiliates expect if and when this bill gets through? Simple:
- Expect a few merchants to get out of the market. The very same thing happened in New York, and I suspect this will happen here as well.
- Expect decrease in commissions. That’s right. Companies can’t afford to pay you the same amount of money if they are getting taxed through their nose.
- Affiliates to lose more battles across the country. I was optimistic a few months ago but not anymore. The country is in trouble, and I am sure there are a lot of states that want to close this “loophole.”
- Expect more Internet regulations. As the country struggles economically, you can expect more taxes and more regulations for the Internet industry. It’s sad to say, but right now the Internet industry looks extremely attractive to the tax masters.
Did I miss anything? Yes. The end of the world. OK, that’s not going to happen. But the way we are taxing the living and the dead, who knows.
Catch Them While They Are Hot
Super-affiliates keep telling you how you need to work hard and keep banging your heard against the wall to succeed. In truth, a lot of super-affiliates are not what they seem to be. In fact, they make most of their money from membership sites and courses that they sell folks who are desperate to succeed in online marketing. In truth, a lot of top super-affiliates are successful due to their organization. These guys can launch campaigns, find hot products, and form partnerships fast, and that is the main reason behind their success. These guys look at their affiliate business as a real business and not some hobby you do from your bedroom.
You may not have their organization, but you can make a lot of money by catching the hot products fast. You hear from a lot of folks that you’ve got to wait to see a certain gravity number to start promoting a product. That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. If you are not a super-affiliate and you don’t have their resources, you should start with new products as early as possible. Top affiliates afford to throw money around like crazy. If you get into that game with them, you are certainly going to lose. Speed does kill power, early on. In other words, as long as you are fast about going about your business, you can make money before the super affiliates come in.
Most gurus and super-affiliates have huge organizations. They hire employees and outsource things. That means they are going to be slower on a micro level. If you don’t have the resources they have, you can always use your speed of implementation to make money before getting into a head to head encounter with these guys. It may be a hit and miss approach, but it’s way better than burning cash on Adwords trying to outbid those super-affiliates.
What’s Your Favorite Affiliate Program?
One thing about the affiliate business is that you are never out of options as far as programs to promote and networks to join. Networks such as CJ, LinkShare, Clickbank, and Pepperjams provide you with everything you need to promote products online and make money. Personally, Clickbank and CJ have been the best networks to work with but a lot of guys have had success with those other networks. So here is my question for you:
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