Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner
Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing arrangement between online merchants and distributors (affiliates) in which the affiliate earns a commission.
Here are a few articles and videos that I have prepared to help you decide whether or not you should become an affiliate marketer.
I hope they help!
Cheers,
One morning back in March, I hit ‘Check Mail' on my email client and was horrified to see more than 300 emails downloading.
When all was said and done, about 20 of those emails were valid.
285 of them however were all the same – see the screenshot below.
The email came from an adult dating site affiliate program manager who was trying to get affiliates to sign up for his program.
Spamming potential affiliates is bad enough, but worse than that… the email had been sent to hordes of people, all of whom had their email addresses visible because they'd been CC'd, rather than BCC'd.
I immediately assumed that it wouldn't be long until I started receiving spam program invitations from other affiliate program managers and I was right – the first one came in just a couple of hours later from a program that I'm already affiliated with.
I sent a reply to the 2nd spammer to express my dismay and intent to drop his program.
His reply?
I will look forward to having you back on board after you realize we are the best converting dating site on the internet. Best of luck testing our competition!
Duh!
No apology – just a stupid pitch.
He did NOT reply again after I sent him a link to my “Art of Wooing Affiliates” article published on the Revenue Magazine site.
That wasn't the only affiliate program that I ditched that day, however.
If you read the article linked above, under “Affiliate Tip” you'll see how I found out which affiliate program was responsible for selling the email address to the original spammer. It's a practice I employ with all independent programs.
I just ran through the AffiliateBenchmarks affiliate marketing survey, and it's a very well-constructed survey to determine current affiliate practices.
Affiliates who complete the survey will receive a free copy.
Here's the press release:
New York, NY (PRWEB) July 8, 2009 — AffiliateBenchmarks, a research division of outsourced affiliate management agency NETexponent, has released an affiliate marketing survey to be completed by affiliates and website publishers by July 31st 2009. The survey results will gather best practices for several aspects of affiliate marketing, including how best to communicate with affiliates, what advertisers can do to optimize affiliate relationships, what tools and information affiliates crave, and what challenges they face. Results will be analyzed and used to identify marketing trends and projected changes. Affiliates who complete the survey will receive a free copy of the results and others will have the option to buy a copy once released.
We were very proud of last years effort and the industry's response but knew we had room for improvement This year survey is not only bigger and better but it also has the support of major affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, PepperJam, Shareasale, and Media Trust. Thanks to the support of these major networks we have been able to optimize our study and significantly increase the number of respondents.
AffiliateBenchmarks produced their first study in 2008 and the research report was met with an extremely positive response from the online marketing community. The positive response from last years research report and continued need for industry benchmarks prompted AffiliateBenchmarks to produce the 2009 survey. This year the AffiliateBenchmarks survey has been significantly expanded and improved based on the knowledge and feedback from the industry leaders. The 2009 survey includes a wide range of questions about topics such as affiliates' experiences with different types of ad performance, site visitor demographics, technology and communication preferences, motivations for joining an affiliate program, experiences with emerging technology, and more.“We were very proud of last years effort and the industry's response but knew we had room for improvement,” said Peter Figueredo, CEO & Co-Founder of NETexponent. “This year survey is not only bigger and better but it also has the support of major affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, PepperJam, Shareasale, and Media Trust. Thanks to the support of these major networks we have been able to optimize our study and significantly increase the number of respondents.”
If you are an affiliate/publisher and are interested in benchmarking your success by completing this survey, we will send you a copy of the results. Your time and input is greatly appreciated. Be sure to complete the survey before July 31, 2009. Affiliate Benchmarks respects the privacy of affiliates and only aggregate information will be shared.
AffiliateBenchmarks is the affiliate research division of NETexponent. AffiliateBenchmarks designs and executes affiliate marketing research with the purpose of increasing industry education and providing useful data and statistics to the affiliate community. We focus on the benefit of the affiliate marketing industry as a whole, and strive to provide reliable information that is interesting and useful to a wide range of people involved with affiliate marketing. Follow us on Twitter @AffBenchmarks.
NETexponent is an online performance based marketing agency located in New York that specializes in outsourced affiliate and search marketing management, growth, and optimization. Founded in January of 2001, the metrics-driven firm leverages nearly a decade of management experience in structuring win-win, performance based deals with its clients. The agency focuses on efficiently acquiring the most valuable customers for each advertiser they work with, while always delivering the highest level of client service. NETexponent is committed to being the industry's leading performance online marketing agency, continually evolving to address changing market conditions and client needs. Follow us on Twitter @NETexponent.
Squidoo's announcement in mid-June has a lot of affiliate marketers running scared – especially those who use article or bum marketing methods and rely heavily on Squidoo for free advertising.
In the supplement to their Terms of Service, Squidoo plans to limit or remove lenses that include:
In the terms of service supplement, Squidoo says:
So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better–and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall–we're introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the same domain on a single lens, your lens could get locked for review.
I can't imagine why anyone would place 9 links to the same domain on a lens, so that shouldn't be too big a deal.
However, if you are an affiliate who actively promotes Squidoo's ever-growing list of Blacklisted domains such as Blackhat SEO sites, reverse phone lookup sites, paid people finder sites and dating sites like AdultFriendfinder – you will find that even one link to those sites will get your lens locked from view.
If your Squidoo lens falls into any of the above categories, then you should get ready to change, delete or move it before mid-July as Squidoo advises:
In mid-July 2009, we will start turning on our systems for scanning the site for junk topic lenses, overly promotional lenses, and X-rated and Adult lenses.
If your lens hits our radar for any of the above outlined policies, then and at any point in the future, we'll lock your lens from view and send you a note to let you know why.
At that time, you will have 7 days to fill out a form requesting a hand review of your lens. We'll point you to the correct form at that time.
We will have 30 days to review your request. If we believe your lens was flagged by accident, we'll unlock it for you within that time. But thanks to the ever-sophisticated tools we've built, we're betting on very few false positives.
If you are an affiliate who relies primarily on article or bum marketing methods, I suggest that you read the Squidoo terms of service supplement.
More importantly, I would suggest that you remember the old phrase “Don't put all your eggs in one basket”.
Over-reliance on one marketing method is dangerous and could prove fatal for your business in the long run. There have been far too many instances in which tricky linking methods, Google plays and arbitrage advertising have led to to the partial or complete demise of an affiliate marketer's hard work.
I feel for those who bought into a program that promises riches through use of only one ‘free' marketing method. The truth is, that there is no such thing as ‘free'. You will spend time and effort to use that singular method only to risk all that you have worked for.
In the Super Affiliate Handbook you'll learn 26 ways to market your affiliate site – and get warnings about 5 marketing strategies that are just a waste of time.
On May 26th, while buying $77 US product through Clickbank, the total amount of the purchase showed up as $90.07 in Canadian dollars (as shown in the screenshot below).
I then checked Oanda for the correct exchange rates from US to Canadian dollars and discovered that the factor was 1.12404, or $77 US equalled $86.59882 Canadian (see screenshot below).
That's a difference of $3.47 – completed wasted!
Well, it would have been completely wasted if I had chosen to use a Canadian dollar credit card – but because I do business in US dollars all the time, I use a US dollar credit card for such purchases.
Using a US dollar credit card to pay for US dollar purchases also allows me to save whatever exhorbitant exchange rates the bank decides to charge on their credit cards – which are also always significantly higher than the actual exchange rates.
Last but not least, I earn affiliate commissions in US dollars which are deposited into a US dollar bank account here in Canada, from which I pay my US dollar credit card bills – and therefore incur no exchange rate losses at all from that setup.
So, if you're doing business as an affiliate marketer here in Canada and earning US dollar commissions, get a US dollar bank account and a US dollar credit card and save some money!
For many aspiring affiliates, that phrase conjures up visions of big beautiful homes and shiny new sports cars.
Graphic images on affiliate training sites encourage visitors to imagine themselves at their desk, dressed in PJ’s and smiling the big happy smile as hundred dollar bills miraculously fly from their computer monitor.
Those images often include a picture of the loving spouse standing in admiration somewhere in the near background.
Another popular image of the “rich affiliate†shows her relaxing in a lounge chair on a long stretch of almost-deserted white sand beach, a laptop perched atop her knees and some tasty tropical drink at hand.
Cynical home-based business opportunists and experienced affiliates alike may snort, snicker or even guffaw at the idyllic portrayal, however with two exceptions, that is an accurate picture of this affiliate’s lifestyle.
The ‘hundred dollar bills’ are in fact four and five-figure checks delivered by snail mail, and I would never bring my laptop to the beach where it might be exposed to the dangers of sand and water. Actually, I’m reluctant to tote the VAIO with me on vacation as I so rarely use it.
Case in point.
I spent the month of March touring Vietnam and Malaysia. Although the resort in Sabah on the island of Borneo and each hotel in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Mihn City (Saigon) provided free or inexpensive access to high-speed Internet, I spent less than 3 hours at my computer during the entire trip.
And I was not working during that time.
I spent it uploading vacation pictures to Flickr for my personal travel blog at Roamsters.com and GoogleTalking with family and friends. The few emails and responses I sent to friends in the industry were primarily to feign sympathy for their ugly early-spring weather and to talk about enduring three-and-a-half hour spa treatments and swims in the 86 degree Fahrenheit (30C) waters of the South China Sea.
My month-long vacation wasn’t the ‘once in a lifetime’ trip about which many people dream either. It was the trip I take every fall/winter. Moreover, the winter trips represent only a small percentage of my annual vacation-time.
In 2007, I spent 4 months away from home for pleasure travel and family events — not to confuse the two. Furthermore, to make the best use of our short Canadian summer, I work only a few hours per week during June, July and August.
Do I tell you this to gloat?
Not at all!
OK, maybe a little.
But what’s really important here is for you to know that:
Ray earns 7-figures a year as a PPC search affiliate. He works with a paid assistant in rented office space where, for eight to ten hours a day, they scramble to investigate new product offers in a vast array of markets, create static landing pages, write and place ads, and monitor their conversions to sales. His workload doubles during the ramp-up to major holidays. Simply talking to him about his frenzied business at Christmastime left me feeling frazzled and I was in the midst of a 3-week break!
Despite all that money, Ray still can’t relax with his family at the cabin for the weekend without working evenings at his laptop. He told me that it was a major effort to ready his business for a week’s absence during a family emergency, and when Ray heard about my latest foray abroad, he replied by saying “I really wish I had more time to travelâ€.
Ray would have more time to travel if he made more time to travel, something he could easily do if he adopted a few content publisher strategies.
Although we too research new offers, write product endorsements, create landing pages and place PPC ads; we dig much deeper into far fewer markets, which means less email to read and fewer offers to research. Placing ten to thirty offers that run dynamic ads on one theme site is considerably less time-consuming than placing 1000’s of individual product ads that must be constantly monitored and revised.
Rather than chasing offers, content affiliates concentrate on building relationships with potential customers through information and entertainment. Delivery is simple and cheap via blogs, email and RSS feeds.
Moreover, blogging, podcasting and making videos is way more fun than ad-writing. The biggest advantage however comes from the ability to plan our publishing schedules well in advance.
So, if I suddenly required an uninterrupted month of time to respond to a family emergency or to take advantage of a extraordinary travel opportunity, I would login to my blog, select four draft articles and queue them up for delivery – one per week.
The same articles would then be queued in the same order for delivery through my autoresponder. To keep my business humming along for four weeks would take about five minutes per site, or less time than it would take to pack my bags.
He could start with an existing niche in which he has had success, preferably one of an evergreen nature such as dating, skin care or weight loss. In as little as a day, he could rework and load seven of his best product reviews into an autoresponder series and put an email capture form on the applicable site. He should also take a minute to install a blog on that site, and spend 20 to 50 bucks to have a designer work his existing template into the blog.
Next, Ray should reallocate just one day per week of his pay per click ad writing time and devote that instead to writing articles and product endorsements.
By producing just four short articles per week, in three months Ray will have populated his blog and autoresponder with a year’s worth of messages to be published and delivered to his subscribers every week. As the size of his subscriber lists grow, not only will Ray’s income increase, but he will also be able to lower his pay per click advertising costs substantially.
And if Ray’s perpetual pay per click ad writing has left him short on prose, he could hire a ghostwriter to write those articles. Better yet, he could hire a team of ghostwriters to write articles in a half dozen of his best niche markets and get his affiliate business to the ‘set it, forget it and go on vacation’ stage more quickly.
The last step in the process, taking a vacation, might be the most difficult for workaholic affiliate Ray, as he may be tempted to use his newfound ‘free’ time to build an even bigger empire.
Whether you are an aspiring or a seven-figure affiliate, making time to rest and rejuvenate body, mind and soul is the best thing you will ever do for you and your family. When you are refreshed and focused, you become even more efficient and productive in your work. So, leave the laptop at home and go have fun. With practice, you’ll soon discover that living the Lifestyle and taking vacations is as easy as FTP.
Oh, and one last thing. When making your travel reservations online, remember to book through your own affiliate link!
Did you find this post about Christmas gifts for bloggers informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question, or suggestion, please leave a comment below!
Cheers,
Do you know how to track your conversions? No? Then read this article!
In response to the “Q and A: Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing” article, Carol asked a VERY good question…
“How can you determine the conversions when you are promoting affiliate products where the actual sale occurs on someone else's site? I've noticed that you can obtain code from Google to place on your “thank you for the order” page…. but is the sale occurs elsewhere, you obviously can't do that. Once they have left your site to go to the vendor's site, then you lose the ability to see what happens there.”
I'll admit that conversion tracking for affiliate marketers who use PPC search engines to drive traffic is tough, but it IS possible.
In rare cases, a merchant will allow an affiliate (usually only Super Affiliates) to have the Google conversion tracking javascript installed on their thank-you page – where the sale is finalized.
But because most affiliates aren't able to place code on the merchant's thank you page, they have to do a little more work to find out which keywords are converting in their PPC campaigns.
Many networks allow affiliates to track sales by specifiying a variable in the affiliate URL. Commission Junction uses the SID parameter and Clickbank uses TID, short for ‘tracking ID.
Here is an example of an ecrypted CJ link with an SID that links to Single Parents Mingle.
http://www.dpbolvw.net/i7117p-85-7NPTVUWPTNPOTQWPSS?sid=138
To make the SID's work for you, you need to first place Google Analytics on your landing pages and then assign unique tracking numbers or codes to each one of your keywords. This is simple enough to do if you build out your keyword lists using a spreadsheet. Here's the SID/keyword portion of a sample spreadsheet:
136 single parent dating
137 single parents
138 single parents dating
139 single dads
140 single moms
Next, the Destination URL's in your Google Adwords campaign must correspond to your SID's and is most effective when you are direct linking from Google Adwords to the merchant. It can work however if you create multiple landing pages. Here is an example of a link that you might use to direct traffic to a Single Parents Mingle review page on a dating site.
https://101date.com/single-parents-mingle-site-review/?keyword=138
You'll notice that 138 links to the keyword phrase ‘single parents dating'.
When each of your keywords has a tracking ID and a landing page with a corresponding affiliate URL, you'll be able to see exactly which keywords are making the most sales when you run your commission reports.
Yes, it's hugely tedious to link and match all your keywords, Destination URL's and affiliate links this way, but it is worth your time and effort.
SpeedPPC 3 is designed to help you produce accurate, EFFECTIVE campaigns with a solid ROI that include dynamically matching keywords to ad groups, matching keywords to similar keywords on dynamically created landing pages, great Google Quality Scores, and high converting campaigns.