WordPress Plugin Development meets Affiliate Marketing
Many new affiliate marketers assume that the only way to make some money online is by pushing ClickBank products or starting a blog about the product they intend to sell. Those tactics can work. But there are better ways to make money online from affiliate product. One cool way to do it is by giving away a very useful tool and ask people to support you for your work through your affiliate links.
These days, if you know coding or know someone who can bring your ideas to life, the sky’s the limit. Take WordPress for instance. There are millions of people who are using it as their main platform. Creating a killer free plugin for WordPress can put your work in front of a lot of WordPress users. If your plugin is good enough, people will have no trouble supporting your work.
The best way to approach this is by identifying a need that is not being satisfied by all the plugins that are available for WordPress. Or you can just focus on a very new services that do not have any plugins written for them. In order to succeed with this strategy, you are going to create a high quality plugin, so don’t even think about cutting corners.
Affiliate Marketing and Need for Innovation
Affiliate marketing gets a bad rap from a lot of people who have no idea what this business is about. Many think of us as spammers (not that there are not spammers among us). A lot of others think of affiliate marketing as their way to make millions of dollars from their bed, without having to actually do some work. In reality, affiliate marketing is easy to pick up and hard to master. Making your first $100 or $1000 is not going to be that difficult if you go with the basics. Making a living from selling other people’s products is another story.
In order to build a long term business promoting products online, affiliates need to innovate and continue to do so to stay competitive in this market. Let’s face it. There are plenty of unethical affiliate marketers out there. I am talking about those who will clone everything you have done without hesitation. There is nothing wrong with learning from other people’s strategies and implementing what has worked for them. It’s another thing to create copycat websites to take business away from other affiliates. A lot of people do it. While it’s not illegal per se, it does make it necessary for all affiliates to continue to innovate to set themselves apart from copycat artists.
Why Affiliates Should Not Use 3rd Party URL Shorteners
If you have been taking advantage of Twitter, you have probably used URL shorteners to keep your status updates under 140 characters. Third party URL shorteners do make it easy to make your URLs more clean and keep track of clicks and shares of each link. Services such as TinyURL, Bit.ly, and BudURL have all been around for a while and provide a lot of value to those who choose to use them.
There are many reasons why one would want to use these services to track affiliate links. In fact, a lot of gurus suggest that without really thinking about the ramifications. For starters, if you have long term plans for your affiliate portal, you want to brand everything you can, including your link. Using solutions such as Redirection will allow you to create your very own URL shortener without relying on any other company. (more…)
5 Ways To Handle Affiliate Issues
We all want to assume that affiliate programs will honor their agreements and pay up when their affiliates deliver sales for them. There are plenty of affiliate programs that do everything possible to reduce their affiliates’ commissions and avoid paying up. You certainly do not want to work with those programs. At the same time, sometimes even the largest affiliate programs fail to fully pay their affiliates. It’s easy to get stressed out and freak out over these incidents. But if you want to get paid, you want to keep a cool head.
Reputable affiliate programs are often easier to work with in these situations. They care about their reputation, so they do respond if you file your claim. Some large networks do take some time to get back to you, but if your case is valid, you are going to get paid. What you don’t want to do is pick a fight with your merchant. That could have terrible ramifications for your business.
If you have not been paid by your affiliate company, it does not mean that you won’t get paid. You just have to approach things calmly. Here are just a few steps you need to take to solve your non-payment issues:
1. Don’t panic: no matter how much money you have lost, losing it is not going to help you solve your issues. You may need your commission check to stay afloat, but you do not want to make rash decisions without thinking through your strategy first.
2. Be polite: always, and I mean always, be polite with your affiliate manager. A lot of people assume that if they raise their voice on the phone or write a nasty e-mail, they are going to get more attention from their partner. Nobody likes a nasty person. You are more likely to get the help and attention you need by being polite and nice.
3. Explain & follow up: clearly explain what has gone wrong and why you believe you should be paid for your efforts. Do not assume the worst case. Put all the facts on the table and follow up with your merchant. (more…)
Why You Should Have Many Affiliate Tracking IDs
Most newbie affiliate marketers start with large affiliate networks such as Amazon, CJ, and LinkShare. All these networks have their advantages and disadvantages. But one thing is for certain. You do not want to cut corners when managing your affiliate campaigns, no matter which network you are partnering with. Many newbie affiliates start a host of new sites and use the same tracking ID on all of them. While that may save you time when grabbing links from these networks, it does mean that you are going to have a more difficult time figuring out which campaign or website is bringing you the most cash.
Creating multiple tracking IDs are not that difficult as long as you are working with a credible network. Amazon makes it so easy by putting the option on the same page where you can view your payment history. Since all Amazon affiliates are hooked on this page for obvious reasons, they’ll have an easier time creating multiple IDs and tracking their campaigns in a more professional manner. Tracking your campaigns with CJ is easy as well. All you have to do is define a SID:
http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-xxxxxx-xxxxxx?sid=[YourTrackingID]&url=xxxx
8 Best Wordpress Themes for Affiliate Marketers
A lot of affiliates are now starting to understand the power of Wordpress when it comes to developing affiliate portals to make money online. A few years ago, people used to use those good old HTML based websites to get their affiliate landing pages up and running. But with the power of Wordpress, you can manage huge portals easily without sweating a break. Best of all, Wordpress is for free, so you’ve really got nothing to lose by using Wordpress for your affiliate websites. Just make sure you choose a good theme to keep things looking as professional as possible.
If you are looking for a cool affiliate theme for Wordpress that not only is well-designed but it gives you the chance to make more sales everyday, here are 8 affiliate Wordpress themes you should consider:
Affiliate Theme: the ultimate theme for affiliate marketers. If you are looking to start your review site or just manage your landing pages, Affiliate Theme comes in very handy.
eShop: many affiliate marketers make money by selling products from Amazon and eBay. If you happen to be in that group, you are going to find eShop for Wordpress pretty useful. Makes it easy to create a store around affiliate products.
Kidz Store: another attractive e-shop Wordpress theme that you can use to sell affiliate products. You can even build your own store and mix it up with your affiliate products. The choice is yours.
Classipress: a powerful classified listing theme for affiliate marketers. While you can use this theme to create a fully-fledged classified website, you can also build a killer affiliate portal. Just be creative!
Paid Reviews and Affiliate Marketing
Many affiliates wonder how bloggers and portal owners easily get their hands on freebies. It’s easy to assume that all these folks are getting paid for their work. Some actually are. Thanks to the FTC’s latest guidelines for bloggers and online marketers, you can find out about those relationships on disclosure pages. But in many cases, those top portals are just happy to review the latest gizmos and products without getting compensated. After all, they get to keep their visitors and add more.
Paid reviews are not looked up favorably by too many people. It’s not easy to assume that one can stay unbiased when they have been paid to write a review about a product. You can argue the same for affiliate products. Would you consider criticizing a product that you are planning to refer your visitors to? We have all seen those glorious, “best in the history,” reviews for products that are absolutely terrible. Those affiliates either know they have stupid visitors or they assume their visitors are gullible. (more…)
Google and Affiliate Marketing
If you have been around the Internet marketing world for a while, you have probably seen all these “gurus” who claim they are making this much or that much money from Google only. Some of these guys claim they are making 6 or 7 figure incomes from Google alone. As someone who has made 6 figure income from Google, I can tell you that it’s certainly possible to pull that off. But it’s not easy and may not last for too long.
It was just a couple of years ago that I cleared over $60K in earnings in one month just from Google. Our team had the right strategy and implemented it at the right time. We are talking about organic search here only. If you can get your affiliate website to rank high for those general and specific keywords, there is no reason you can’t make a decent chuck of cash. But here is the caveat. There are multiple ways Google can screw with you and your business. For starters, the company is constantly making tweaks to its algorithm. So while you may show up on the top of the rankings one day, don’t be surprised to get moved all the way down the rankings the next day.
E-commerce Theme: Build a Store With Your Own Affiliate Program
Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative business if you are in the right niche at the right time with the right strategy. Those who have mastered the art of affiliate marketing easily pull in 6 figures. Of course, things are more complicated that that. So the stories about people who sleep all day and make a fortune from affiliate marketing is simply not true. Affiliate marketing can be a great field to be involved in. But it can be quite volatile too. That’s why affiliate superstars not only rely on affiliate products to make money, but they come up with a product of their own as well. If you have revenue coming in from multiple sources, you are not going to be affected by Internet tax and other affiliate marketing nonsense as badly as those who solely focus on affiliate marketing.
Starting your very own store and selling your own products is not that hard. There are plenty of templates and plugins that you can pick up to start an online store. You are going to need products to sell, but you shouldn’t have to worry about how you are going to get them listed online. E-commerce theme by Templatic is a very interesting solution if you want to use Wordpress to start your own store. Not only it is clean and looks decent, it also allows you to start your own affiliate program. Talk about going from an affiliate to an affiliate manager overnight.
Complementary Products and Affiliate Marketing
We have all heard about how companies use the idea of adding complementary products to increase their sales and retain their customers. Think about it. If someone is coming to your store to pick up a laptop, they might need a mouse, a laptop cooler, and a travel adapter as well. Would you want to risk not having those products available in your store and have your customers walk away? The same concept applies to affiliate marketing as well. If you are spending time pushing a product to your visitors, you do want to make sure you let them know about complementary products that they can take advantage of to get the most out of the products they are purchasing from you or through your affiliate links.
There are two ways to take advantage of this approach. A lot of affiliate marketers focus on revenue first strategy. In essence, they bundle together a bunch of affiliate products on their landing pages and walk their readers through the steps to sell them as many times as possible. That could work wonders for your business or it could be an utter disaster. It really depends on how to execute it.
