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.
How long have we been in the business of affiliate marketing? A dozen years or more? Well you'd figure that merchants with affiliate programs – especially those affiliated with Commission Junction would know better than to place Google Adsense on their affiliate's landing pages… see the screenshot below.
My advice?
Drop 'em if you got 'em!
Although I sell millions of dollars of products for my affiliated merchant partners each and every year, I still don't consider what I do as ‘selling'.
Quite frankly, I hate being sold to and can only imagine that you feel the same about the steady barrage of product pitches that you see on sites and in your email.
The point to remember is that your customers are put off by the hype they see too much of every day.
Therefore, make it your job to advise, recommend and endorse products rather than try to ‘sell' them.
The first step is to start from a friendly perspective by getting to know who your site visitors are and what they need and want through polls, surveys or direct request.
Next, prove that you understand and have empathy for their concerns by echoing their frustrations. Share a personal story of your own experience with a similar problem and tell them how you were able to solve that problem with the product you are about to endorse.
Above all, be honest. No product is perfect, so a 100% positive product endorsement will be met with skepticism and resistance by your readers. So, be sure to point out any minor shortfalls and limitations. Alternatively, consider comparing and contrasting two different products to give your visitors a variety of options from which to choose.
Finally, close your endorsement with an enthusiastic reminder of your thumbs up rating and a recommendation to buy the product.
In a nutshell, take that salesman's hat off and start talking to your visitors the same way you would tell a friend about a product that you really like.
That's how to sell without selling.
*** This article is a modified version of the original which first appeared in Chitika's Blog Bash – 30 Days, 30 Expert Bloggers.
Want to learn more about how to sell like a pro?
One of my favorite books on the subject of selling is Ziglar on Selling: The Ultimate Handbook for the Complete Sales Professional.
The book consists of 343 pages of stellar insights into the world's oldest profession and important life lessons.
This is a must-have book to include in your online marketing / sales education library – and it's cheap!
Well, Get just TWO items and you can set up a blog and be in business as an affiliate marketer.
One thing I love best about affiliate marketing is that the financial barrier to entry is low. In other words, it doesn't cost much at all, meaning that anyone with a little bit of money can start a business as an affiliate marketer.
Assuming that you already have a computer that is connected to the Internet, the TWO most basic services that you'll need are a domain name and a web host.
YES!!! you absolutely MUST have your own domain name and pay for hosting or you are NOT going to be in business for so many reasons, not least of which is that you will not be accepted to promote most products if you operate a free website.
Here are just a couple of the articles I've written about the perils of free hosting. I get much more explicit about the ‘whys' in my Super Affiliate Handbook.
So, here are the basic costs associated with setting up your own website / blog.
You can register your domain name at GoDaddy for as little as $9.99 for a .com name, or get it included when you set up your web hosting service (see next item).
I list a number of recommended web hosts here. Some like, Bluehost, include your domain registration fee for one year in the purchase price of your web hosting service. Others offer improved SEO (search engine optimization) capabilities and customer service.
Of course, these are the most basic services.
In time, you'll need to add other services such as an autoresponder and perhaps buy some content for your site if you don't like to write.
But just getting blog started doesn't require anything beyond having a domain name and web hosting.
Total cost?
About $7.00 a month – or $27.00 per month with the autoresponder service.
Did you find this post informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question or suggestion, please leave a comment below!
Cheers,
You've probably heard the stories of affiliate marketers using PPC advertising to promote CPA ringtone offers and making millions in the process. Well, by and large the days of ringtone riches are done, but there's still LOTS of money to be made promoting CPA offers and you don't necessarily have to use PPC.
As an affiliate marketer, my focus is primarily on added-value publishing, list-building and promoting pay-for-performance (per sale or percentage) products. (How's THAT for alliteration?) With those subjects emphasized in the Super Affiliate Handbook, CPA (Cost-Per-Action or Cost-Per-Acquisition) marketing is discussed only in brief, which is not to say that I don't promote CPA offers – I do – I just don't use or advocate CPA marketing (in its most common form) as a mainstay.
This article explains what CPA marketing is, it's advantages and shortcomings, and how I use it as an affiliate publisher.
CPA marketing can be defined as an “online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying actions such as sales or registrations“.
In simplest terms – get someone to enter their email address (and/or snail mail address, zip code) into a form and you can make money as a CPA affiliate. Other ‘actions' including getting the visitor to take a poll or survey, fill out a form, or sign up for a newsletter.
Here's an example of a $1000 grocery gift card offer from Affiliate.com that requires the visitor to enter an email address on the first page and then their snail mail address on the second page. With the snail mail address entered, the affiliate earns $1.65 per lead. Note: Most email submits pay in the range of $1.00 to $1.35 per lead.
Credit card offers can be quite lucrative, typically ranging from $5.00 per application on pre-paid cards and upwards of $50.00 per approval for premium credits such as the American Express® Preferred Rewards Gold Card.
Big companies have big advertising budgets and rather than use that money to try and place their ads here, there and everywhere on the ‘Net, they understand and appreciate how the effectiveness of utilizing affiliate marketers to get the word out for them. They know that it's the affiliate who assumes the cost of running PPC traffic to the offer.
For example, it may cost an affiliate $25 to make $50 on a mortgage refinancing offer that simply requires completion of an online form. But the refinancing company stands to make thousands – make that 10's of thousands of dollars – from every new mortgage arranged. So, it's worth $50 to a mortgage broker to buy those leads. Anyone who fills in the form is targeted – they're actually looking for that type of product and if they don't buy today – the merchant can continue to advertise to them.
Essentially therefore, CPA affiliates are traffic brokers, i.e. they buy and sell traffic.
As with any business venture, working CPA offers has some distinct advantages as well as a few pitfalls.
If you have a list, or can drive traffic cheaply to either a landing page on your site or directly to the offer, earnings potential with CPA offers can be absolutely huge.
Experienced (proven) affiliates can negotiate with CPA Network managers to increase the CPA rate, i.e. from $1.50 to $1.75 per lead.
Many CPA campaigns involve freebies, such as free coupons, free product trials and buy-1-get-1-free offers which consumers simply lap up… ergo, easy sells.
Direct linking tactics, e.g. from Google Adwords to the offer, negate the need for a website or list-building. (see also ‘Disadvantages' regarding this approach).
Your efforts to direct link from a PPC ad campaign might be stymied. For example, Yahoo does not allow affiliates to link directly to merchant offers. Google permits direct linking, but only one ad per url is allowed to show at a time, so you could end up in a bidding war with other affiliates which could kill profit potential.
CPA Networks are very selective about whom they accept as affiliates. Most will phone applicants to determine how the affiliate plans to drive traffic and what offers they intend to promote. From the standpoint of an experienced affiliate, this is actually an advantage. However the requirement to explain can be a problem for new affiliates. Here is a list of typical questions that will be asked:
Inexperienced affiliates are at risk of losing money on direct linking campaigns.
Payouts vary widely across networks so you must do your homework to get the best deal.
“Here today, gone tomorrow” is my biggest complaint about CPA offers. I'm simply too lazy to constantly monitor whether campaigns are still running and/or chase after replacements.
The only way to gain experience with direct linking is to get in and get your hands dirty.
Research existing campaigns to find out what works – from the standpoint of longevity, i.e. the longer an ad has been up and running, the more lucrative the promotion. Find an offer, decide the maximum amount you are willing to invest on a cost per click basis, write the ad and then tweak, tweak and tweak some more. Even if you experience a loss or your earnings are marginal, you've no doubt learned valuable lessons about advertising and copywriting that will contribute to your success in the long run.
Having existing websites and large subscriber lists, I don't need to spend money on PPC advertising to earn from CPA offers. I simply put up a 125 X 125 banner on a blog sidebar (such as the MyLife.com banner at 101Date.com) or include promos in regular mailings to my list.
Although some CPA offers are available through the major networks, CPA networks specialize in cost-per-action campaigns. There seem to be hundreds of such networks, with new ones sprouting up daily. Examples of long-standing CPA networks include:
CPA offers come in all shapes and sizes. Here's a list of the top categories listed on Affiliate.com
So, that in a nutshell is CPA marketing explained, along with some of its advantages and pitfalls and how I promote CPA offers. Is it for you? That's up to you – however if you decide to try that route, I highly recommend that you pick up a tutorial on the subject that goes into more detail about how best to promote CPA.
The good news – You don't need to spend 2K on CPA marketing training. Chris Cobb's CPA Arbitrage $77 complete system teaches you where and how to find the best CPA offers and how best to make money promoting them. What I particularly like about Chris' system is that in addition to taking the direct-linking approach, Chris advocates list-building – a long-term stratey that will help you save money on PPC advertising and make more money in the long run.
Indeed, he gets 7,000 – 8,000 new names and e-mails into his back office systems each and every day and he shows you how to set this up, so that ongoing sales and commissions keep coming in….
CPA Arbitrage comes with a workbook and live training videos about which Chris says, “I'm going to give you the very basics in the workbook and then I'm going to show you the 2 money-getting CPA models that I use to make hundreds of thousands each and every month… “
Just reading the CPA Arbitrage sales copy will give you a good idea of the possibilities.
Do a Google Search for the name of the package you intend to buy and see how many other resellers are selling it.
This is true, especially for info products and software related to changing technology.
Some packages offer the buyer resale rights licenses, but not the reseller's clients.
Your page will rank higher in the search engines if it differs from competitors who are selling exactly the same product(s).
Build an autoresponder series and collect your customer's email addresses.
Contact your customers with product offers related to their demonstrated interests you can backend with other resale rights packages or with products on which you'll earn affiliate commissions.
If you specialize in marketing the resale rights aspect of products to your clients, consider starting a membership site through which you can offer your existing clients (members) discounted versions of each new product that you add to your line.
On April 27th, Clickbank announced that their new HopLink Shield links were fully operational.
HopLink Shield is a free tool on the Clickbank website that encrypts the affiliate and vendor nicknames in HopLinks. It is supposed to add another layer of privacy / anonymity to help keep affiliates promotional efforts and techniques hidden.
It doesn't quite work that way, however.
As shown in the sceenshot below, to encode your HopLinks your hoplinks, you enter your affiliate nickname and the vendor nickname below then hit the “Encode” button (or you can get the same type of links encoded directly through the Clickbank Marketplace without going to the Encoder).
You then end up with a hoplink that looks like this:
http://e3f88il-ze5dou56-ib8trcsef.hop.clickbank.net/
Now, if you go to https://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_encoding.htm you'll see the “Decoder” on the right side of the page, so the new links don't exactly hide anything.
So, don't give up on your redirects just yet.
I was wondering why I hadn't earned a commission on a particular product in quite awhile.
The merchant had given me a free domain set up to redirect to their store with my affiliate link, so I went to that URL and it was still redirecting, no problem.
However, when I clicked on “Buy Now!” and arrived on the Clickbank order page, this is what I found.
Rotten – simply ROTTEN. They apparently stripped my affiliate link from the redirect. Unbelievable. That's the first time since 1998 – and sending a LOT of traffic to free merchant domains – that I've been scammed like that.
Needless to say, I'm no longer promoting their service.
Lesson – Unless you've worked with a merchant successfully for a long time, stay away from their offers of free domains. It's simple enough to code your own redirect and you won't have to worry that they'll scam you by changing out your links.