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…)

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?

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.

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!

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:

1. You don’t know what you are doing and are hoping to make a few bucks without doing your homework
2. You want me to promote the product you are promoting too.
3. You want me to be able to search the web to find out what you have been doing.
4. 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?

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?

Others Pain Could Be Your Affiliate Gain

Affiliate Marketing is the game of timing. Most successful affiliates have often found themselves in the right place at the right time. But you should not believe for a second that these top guys are at the right place at the right time by chance. Take these days. People are losing their jobs. They have trouble paying their credit card debt, and those who can afford to pay down their debt are looking to consolidate. A newbie affiliate will probably look at this and feel sad for those folks.

There is nothing wrong about feeling for others. But I rather do something about it. Right there, you have awesome niches that you can tackle for your affiliate business: 1. job hunting 2. credit card debt repair 3. debt consolidation 4. cash advance 5. loans 6. making money from home. There are many other niches that you can target by thinking carefully about these folks who are getting squeezed by the collapse of the U.S. economy.

You may come out and say that it’s wrong to take advantage of folks in trouble. But think about it. Are we taking advantage of them or are we helping them? I firmly believe that you should put your customers/leads first. You should think about their needs and try to offer them ways to get out of trouble. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get paid for your trouble. After all, if you don’t make money, you are going to end up like them.

A lot of affiliate marketers are very picky when it comes to offers they promote. But they use the wrong criteria to choose their products. I personally don’t offer products that are associated with the word “scam.” As an ethical myself, I take it upon myself to try the products and services that I promote and do some research before recommending products to others. In most markets, you are going to find a handful of decent products. And if you happen to find a niche that doesn’t have a decent product targeting that market, let me know You can always create your product and make a killing.