Affiliate Marketing and Success: How to Define it?

Whether you are a part time affiliate marketer or a seasoned full time affiliate, you need to have a set of success metrics in place to make sure you stay on track with your business. If you are a part time affiliate, I assume your first goal is to make enough money to quit your day job and focus all your efforts on affiliate marketing. Experienced affiliate marketers probably have more lofty goals. There is so much money you can earn being a one man operation. That’s why no matter how much success you are having with affiliate marketing, you need to invest in the future of your business.

Many new affiliates assume that making millions of dollars a month is possible. That’s why they fall for those get rich quick courses that promises a lot and fail to deliver even a little. Let’s be honest. There are not too many courses around these days that provide you with a specific plan or method to making thousands of dollars from your affiliate business. I have seen courses that promise to teach you how to make a $1 or $1000 a month. That’s actually a more realistic approach. But those who tell you they are making thousands with Amazon and Clickbank show you their revenue source but don’t teach you the exact way you can get it done. In most cases, these guys have years of advantage over you, so even if you copy their operations, they are going to come out on top. (more…)

Why Chitika Is a Must Try for Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a tough business to be involved in, especially if you are looking to make more than a few quick bucks in the industry. The industry is very competitive and not everybody plays by the same rules. So your earnings per month could be affected by what your competitors decide to do. You can always introduce Adsense to your landing pages to make more money, but that could be a bit problematic as Adsense ads are always there, and they do take away from your conversions.

That’s where Chitika ads are useful. These ads are contextual, so your visitors see ads about what they are searching for. The service is designed to help you monetize your SEO ads. It’s true that a lot of affiliates keep their PPC and SEO landing pages separate. Whether you are doing that or not, Chitika provides you with another source of revenue.

Chitika is not currently topping my Adsense revenue but there are a lot of people who have had more success with their Chitika ads than their Adsense ones. It’s certainly worth testing and is much more flexible than Adsense. For starters, your visitors won’t see your ads unless they have searched for a keyword phrase and have found your website through a third party web service. So your landing page would look smooth all the time, and your organic traffic gets to see targeted ads.

Should you try Chitika? For me, it’s been more than worth it. It’s not going to be the right solution for everyone. But it certainly beats using Adsense if you don’t want your paid search visitors to see your ads. It never hurts to test, and you can always get rid of these ads if they don’t perform.

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…)

5 Must Read Books For Affiliate Marketers

The affiliate marketing business is changing all the time. Whether you are new to the game or just want to keep up with the latest developments in the affiliate marketing world, you are going to have to find resources that you can trust to learn new information from. There is always blogs and forums that could help, but I personally recommend adding a few books to the mix just to give your information diet the right balance. There are plenty of books that promise to teach you how to make millions, but we are going to focus on affiliate books that actually teach you something useful. With that in mind, here are 5 books (courses) that could help you become a better affiliate:

Mastering Niche Marketing: niche marketing is one of the best ways to make money online these days. If you know how the game is played, there is no reason you can’t make a living online.

Google AdWords For Dummies: one of the best Adwords books around. If you want to promote affiliate products through pay per click marketing, this book is a must read.

Web Analytics 2.0: a refreshing look at how you can use your analytics software to optimize your pages and get more out of your affiliate campaigns. It teaches you enough to be very dangerous.

Landing Page Optimization For Dummies: if you have not done landing page optimization before, here is your chance to learn enough information to get started. After all, what’s the point of knowing everything there is to know about analytics if you don’t know how to optimize your pages. (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…)

Should You Use Adsense Next To Your Affiliate Offers?

Google Adsense is an easy way to make a few bucks here or there. If you happen to have the right strategy going with your affiliate portal, you may actually be able to make a decent amount of money per month and make a living off of Google. At first, publishers and bloggers were the ones using Google Adsense to monetize their work. But recently affiliate marketers and product makers have also added Adsense to their landing pages. After all, if you are not going to get a conversion from your visitors, you may as well get paid for them to leave, right?

The issue of Adsense on affiliate landing pages is very controversial. As an affiliate, your goal is to drive traffic to your landing pages and optimize them in a way that helps your bottom line. If you are driving paid traffic to your website, the last thing you want is give your visitors an easy way to get out of your website. Google Adsense ads are a big exit sign. There is return mechanism to get back the visitors who have clicked on your ads. So you are at their mercy. In most cases, these people don’t come back to your website.

Many super affiliates who are using their own sales-letters to make money online are using their Google Adsense units at the very end of their newsletters. That is an interesting practice, as you give your visitors enough chance to take advantage of your offer. But in case they have read the whole newsletter and still are not ready to take you upon your offer, you may as well make a buck or two when they leave. The more controversial practice is using sidebar Adsense units and putting ads in a prominent position on your website. Can that possibly work?

(more…)

Affiliates on Twitter: The Next Battle Ground

There are many affiliate marketers who take advantage of the latest technologies to make more money online. There is such a thing as early mover, and the sooner you position yourself to take advantage of the latest developments all around you, the better you can position yourself to start dominating your market. Twitter has quickly become one of those battlegrounds for affiliates. Twitter is one of the best services to drive traffic to any website. It’s not just about the quantity of traffic but rather the quality of it as well. Let’s say you have a website about credit cards, and you have 10,000 people following you on Twitter. If you have truly put the time in to gain your followers trust, there is no reason you can’t make money from your efforts.

Just like any other technology, there is a right way and wrong way to use it. There are many affiliates who are using black hat tactics to create bogus accounts on Twitter and use them to bombard the community with their affiliate offers. You can almost tell an automated account for a real one these days. But the scripts and bots are becoming more sophisticated. That practice is going to get a bit more difficult to execute with the latest FTC ruling. And let’s not forget about the community backlash against spammers. If you are dubbed as a spammer, it’s going to get you ignored or banned on twitter. You’ll lose all your followers in the process.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with using automated tools such as Humming Bird or TweetAdder. You can have all the followers in the world, but I personally don’t see any problem with that practice as long as you are not spamming your followers. Having lots of followers is a big responsibility. If you can’t gain their trust and provide them with valuable content, you are going to lose them eventually. So while having them can be a big boost for your business, it will keep you honest as well (unless you don’t mind getting banned on Twitter).

(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…)