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Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing arrangement between online merchants and distributors (affiliates) in which the affiliate earns a commission.

 

 

Latest Scam Emails

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A couple of days ago I received the following in an email…

Dear ebay member,

Thank you for bidding on my item, you are the highest bidder at 1520$ .
Please respond to this email by clicking the button below so we can provide you with shipping cost ! We will need your zipcode .
Thank you

Huh? Say WHAT? I didn't bid on anything!

Well, of course I didn't! (I also didn't click on the link.)

This was just another scam to try and get my account details.

Stay alert! Please don't be fooled by idiots who wouldn't know an honest buck if it slapped them upside the head.

Cheers,
Ros

Will Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy Stand the Test of Time?

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Speaking from the perspective of someone who has successfully made her living online since 1998 with affiliate marketing – and now in addition to building AM (affiliate marketing) sites, also writes, consults and speaks extensively on the subject – I've become increasingly frustrated with tricksters – um, I mean self-appointed *expert* affiliate marketing coaches and trainers – who essentially STEAL money from good people by promising to teach them how to build an affiliate “business” with almost no time, effort or money invested.

Surprisingly, although most of us know that if a promise ‘sounds to good to be true, it probably is‘, there are some who still buy into the lie.

Let me explain.

There are two different types of affiliate marketers with two very different marketing strategies. They are:

SUPER Affiliate Strategy: Build useful content sites that value customer relationships and generate traffic using a variety of methods, and:

NOT-Super Affiliate Strategy: Build all-but-useless content sites designed to trick the search engines into delivering free and easy traffic, but do not build a customer base.

If you've read either my “Net Profits Today” newsletter or the “The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online“, you know that I teach aspiring webmasters how to build affiliate marketing businesses using the SUPER Affiliate's Strategy – PROVEN techniques to build affiliate marketing businesses that stand the test of time.

The NOT Super Affiliate Strategy

Now look closely at this basic outline of how the NOT-Super Affiliate strategy works.

  1. Do keyword research to determine a profitable market.
  2. Build keyword-rich pages to attract search engine spiders.
  3. Submit your site to the engines.
  4. Slap up Adsense ads and MAYBE a few affiliate links.
  5. Do link exchanges with other webmasters.

Yup. That's it. That's ALL there is to it.

So, tricking the search engines should be cheap and easy, right? “

You're right. SEO/Adsense site marketing IS cheap and easy… AND you can make some good money at it.

So, what's the problem

Well, the people who teach this strategy always forget to mention the fact that most search engine optimization techniques fail over time.

In the last year, (TOO) MANY affiliate marketers who were bamboozled into believing that they could build an affiliate marketing BUSINESS using only search engine optimization techniques to get traffic to their sites, have contacted me, desperate to learn the techniques that I teach in the Super Affiliate Handbook because they lost out BIG time.

One webmaster lamented that their income dropped from over 40K per month to a low of $800 per month, and none of their SEO techniques was working to rebuild their income. Having set nothing aside during the good times, they were struggling with their bills and frantic to get back on track.

Oh sure, you can hedge your bets by building hundreds of these sites – which is what “NOT-Super Affiliates” MUST do in order to earn big incomes. That's OK, I suppose, if you want to spend all day every day building one crappy fodder site after the next.

Take note though – I've heard of webmasters having MOST of their sites de-listed all at once.

All that work, and then they're left scrambling to pay the big mortgage that they bought into when times were good.

How frightening would THAT be?

The biggest problem with the NOT-Super Affiliate strategy is that it is a VOLATILE traffic-generating technique – NOT a SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS-building strategy.

Build a Real Affiliate Business Based on Basic Business Practices and Principles

REAL Super affiliate business coaches always teach the most basic business principles, including:

  • Why you should publish contact information on your affiliate site.
  • How to gain credibility by writing informative product endorsements.
  • The importance of having a USP (Unique Selling Position).
  • How to build a subscriber base.
  • How to build valuable, long-term visitor and customer relationships.
  • How to get traffic to your site immediately, using a variety of methods.

No affiliate marketer who wants to build a REAL business, or plans to STAY in business over the long haul, ever short-cuts even ONE of those steps.

So, what constitutes a REAL business?

  • REAL super affiliates don't hide behind the anonymity of the web, but post REAL contact information on every page of their sites. We WANT to hear from our visitors and customers. That's how we gain laser focus and direction.
  • REAL super affiliates offer REAL value to their customers by sharing REAL and RELEVANT information. Fodder is for cows.
  • REAL super affiliates establish REAL relationships with their visitors through opt-in lists, by which they share information about additional products and services. This is where the NOT-Super Affiliate trainers truly fail their students. With a subscriber list, even if your traffic fell to nothing overnight (which it never does with the SUPER Affiliate strategy), you'd still have your lists of subscribers and customers to whom you could send offers.
  • Lastly, REAL super affiliates use a variety of both paid and free methods to bring visitors to their sites, knowing that free traffic generation methods are rarely, if ever, sustainable.

Although building a REAL affiliate marketing business requires a greater initial investment of time, money and effort; the rewards are exponentially greater.

The Sage-Hearts.com Example

For example, I built my first affiliate marketing site, Sage-Hearts.com, in early 1998. I wrote a few reviews of online dating services and articles relevant to the subject of online dating.

I added an Aweber Autoresponder signup form to build my subscriber base.

I drove traffic to the site using a combination of pay-per-click advertising and free traffic-generation methods.

Over the years, I've reviewed and added more dating services and grown my “Singles eScene” list to more than 150,000 subscribers.

ALL I do now with Sage-Hearts.com is occasionally change the content, and send out broadcast messages to my “Singles eScene” list subscribers to tell them about new online dating sites and services.

By the end of its first year online, Sage-Hearts.com was earning well over 5K per month. Now, in 2005, it earns MUCH more than that.

You don't need to build dozens and dozens of sites, when you build each one according to sound business principles.

In the long run, I've done a lot LESS work, than those who build one site after another and constanty have to play cat and mouse with the search engines.

Better yet, I've never experienced a moment of FEAR that today might be the day that Google changes their algorithms and kills my fun.

So, which strategy will YOU choose?

  1. Super Affiliate Strategy – Secure your future and build a few sites with rock-solid foundations, based on REAL business principles… and then go out and play, or;
  2. NOT-Super Affiliate Strategy – Gamble with your future and build hundreds of spineless (list-less), seach-engine fodder sites that will collapse at Google's whim.

The choice should be simple….

See you on the playground! 🙂

By the way, if you are a webmaster whose site is failing under the NOT-Super Affiliate strategy, don't give up yet! There's still hope!

You already know how to build a site and have learned some basic SEO techniques. Those are GOOD skills. Now read the Super Affiliate Handbook and incorporate REAL business-building (SUPER Affiliate) techniques into your existing site.

You've come this far… now go the rest of the way and secure your future!

“The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online”Rosalind Gardner is author of the best-selling “Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in ONE Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online. Get your copy of the Super Affiliate Handbook today!

It’s in the Bag

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As this message is being sent out, my friend Ed and I are winging our way across the Pacific from Vancouver to Beijing.

We're taking a 3 week tour of China that includes stays in Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin (the mammary mountain region), Xian (to see the terra-cotta warriors) and lastly, Hong Kong (to buy fake Rolexes… what else?). 🙂

Oh ya, we're also taking a four-day cruise up the Yangtze River… or maybe it's ‘down' the Yangtze River.

I'm not really sure.

As I write this, it's 4 days before departure, and I am only now starting to feeling a little excited about this adventure.

After all the travelling I did this year to conferences and such, I'm really happy just to be at home with my cat.

(Yes, only one cat… Phoenix passed away in May, and John Harricharan, (Power Pause) bless his extraordinarly kind and gentle heart, helped me get through that journey like no other could.)

But back to the journey at hand…

I find trip planning to be a chore. Will the petsitter be available, should the irrigation be blown out before or after my return, and what DOES one pack to visit China in October? Yada, yada, yada.

The biggest stumbling block in planning this trip was in sourcing luggage.

I've taken to travelling light in recent years (because weight-lifting wrecks shoulders), but needed a slightly larger suitcase in which to pack 3 weeks worth of duds.

 

I'd seen those Samsonite “Spinners” advertised on TV, and thought they looked pretty cool.

Instead of 2 wheels, they have four, which means you don't have to tilt the bag before moving it.

Just push and go.

Or kick and go… your choice.

 

I tested a pretty red one out at a shop in Toronto and loved it, but it was too much to take home with me, and the store wouldn't ship to British Columbia.

So, when I got back to B.C., I checked eBags.com, but the model I wanted wasn't available for shipping to Canada.

I then called the local luggage retailer to see whether they could bring one in from Samsonite for me.

Two days later I found out they could have one shipped in, but that the model was only available in black.

That just wouldn't do.

Everyone and his brother has a black suitcase.

I NEEDED a red one.

So, I called Ed and asked him to check whether another store close to his home in Toronto would ship to B.C.

They wouldn't.

BUT, they did have a brilliant suggestion.

Order it online.

Sure enough… Bentley, the major distributor of luggage in Canada has a site, AND exactly the bag and color I wanted…. um, I mean, needed.

I was so excited by that discovery that I forgot to check and see whether they had an affiliate program before I ordered the darned thing!

(Turns out they don't… and what's up with THAT?)

Anyway, my pretty red suitcase arrived 2 days ago.

Have luggage … will travel.

So what's my luggage sourcing story got to do with Internet and Affiliate marketing?

Well, for those who doubt that the Internet is still growing by leaps and bounds, that story should tell you a great deal.

We're all shopping MORE online everyday, for all sorts of stuff.

For those in small towns, or those who just hate shopping malls, shopping on the Internet is the ONLY way we can (or will) access some goods.

And not all retailers have affiliate programs… yet.

But they will.

There's LOADS of opportunity just waiting for you to reach out and grab it.

You just need to pick a niche and get cracking on your shopping site.

Speaking of shopping, the next item on my list is the matching Samsonite tote.

If you can get Bentley to establish an affiliate progam, I'll buy it through your link! 🙂

Hint… just to make it easy on you… you may want to point them to my article “Online Merchants: Are You Leaving Money on the Table?“.

Good luck!

Online Merchants: Are You Leaving Money on the Table?

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As an affiliate marketer, it's astonishing to see how many online merchants don't have an affiliate programs in place to market their goods.

That's just crazy!

Basically, they're LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE… and lots of it.

Who knows? Maybe they're afraid of ‘sharing' their profits and ‘losing out' somehow?

Again, that's Crazy!

Having hundreds and thousands of affiliates promote your products INCREASES net profits – it doesn't cut into existing income.

Here are the 3 more EXCELLENT reasons for having your own affiliate program:

  1. Get Free Promotion – As a merchant, finding suitable websites on which to run your ad campaigns is a time consuming and expensive process. Putting an affiliate program in place requires a much smaller investment. A successful affiliate program can easily become an online merchant's largest traffic generator.
  2. Increase Search Engine Ranking – Search engines, Google in particular, calculate link popularity as one of the main factors in how they list and rank sites. As such, links into your site from affiliate sites certainly help to improve your rankings.
  3. Improve Brand Popularity – How did strictly online brands like Amazon and Match.com become so popular? Because of their affiliate programs! When you have tens, or even hundreds of thousands, of affiliates all promoting your site, you gain phenomenal exposure. Better yet, all that exposure is free but for the cost of the affiliate program set up and the commissions you share with your affiliates when they make a sale.

I know from personal experience that my affiliates are responsible for the lion's share – around 75% – of sales of my Super Affiliate Handbook.

Letter from a VERY Happy Merchant who started his own affiliate progam.

For still better evidence of the effectiveness of affiliate marketing, here is a letter I received from Tim Knox, a client with whom I first spoke in October 2003:

Hi Rosalind,

It's been awhile since we spoke on the phone and I wanted to give you an update on how much my business has grown in a very short time, due in no small part to the advice I received from you about starting my own affiliate program.If you recall, we initially spoke in October, 2003. I had just purchased your Super Affiliate Handbook and had a thousand questions about affiliate programs.  I invested in an hour of telephone consultation with you and it turned out to be the best investment I could have made in my business because that call sparked my desire to build my own affiliate program.

To refresh your memory, I already had a very successful web site called DropshipWholesale.net which sells my own copyrighted line of informational products focusing on selling dropship and wholesale merchandise online.  My customers consisted of people looking for dropship information and products to sell on eBay and those looking to start their own online sales business.

The primary reason for my call to you was to get your advice on how to better market DropshipWholesale.net and the related line of products.

Your advice on marketing was excellent, but it was your suggestion that I start my own affiliate program that really sparked the fire.

I launched the DropshipWholesale.net Affiliate program a few weeks later and to say the least, the results have been nothing short of phenomenal.

I now have over 500 affiliates around the world who market my products from websites that I provide to them.  The affiliates are paid 50% commission on everything sold.  I know 50% is a high commission to payaffiliates, but as you pointed out it is my affiliates who are helping me build the business, so the thousands of dollars I pay out each week to affiliates truly is money well spent.

I am on track to do over $500,000 in revenue this year with over $200,000 paid out to well-deserving affiliates.

My affiliates and I thank you for you contribution to our success.

Sincerely,

Tim Knox

Just last month, Tim wrote to tell me:

“I did $750K last year and am on track to do $1M this year, all online.”

WOW! and Woohoo!

Now, if that doesn't convince you that you need to start your own affiliate program – I don't know what will.

Perhaps it's the prospect of going through all the rigamarole of searching for, and finding, the perfect affiliate program solution, stops some merchants from setting up their own programs.

Well, I dislike ‘rigamarole' as much as, (probably more than), the next person, so let me allay those fears.

Setting up an affiliate program is just not that big a deal.

All those merchants with affiliate programs now in place can't possibly be Internet Einstein's, so don't expect starting an affiliate program to tax your gray matter any more than anything else you've done in your online business.

OK, I hear ya, but there's always out-sourcing. And remember, the more you outsource, the more time you have for playing golf or with your kids.

How Foreign Currency Fluctuations Affect Affiliate Marketers

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Have you ever wondered how foreign currency fluctuations work for or against you as an affiliate marketer?

foreign currency fluctuationsWhen I started affiliate marketing back in early 1998, getting paid in U.S. Dollars was a huge bonus to me as a Canadian resident. At that time, one US dollar was valued at $1.43 Canadian. By late 2001, the greenback translated into $1.60 Canadian. Woohoo!

Even if my merchants' product prices and commission rates remained the same, I got a raise simply by virtue of foreign currency fluctuations.

For example, let's say that one month I sold 100 dating service memberships at $29.95 for a 50% commission and earned $1497.50 US. In January 1998 that $1497.50 was worth $2141.42 Canadian, and by November 2001, it was worth $2396.00 Canadian dollars, or almost $255.00 CAD more than in 1998!

Unfortunately, the U.S. greenback started slipping steadily against other currencies in early 2002, and on January 14th, 2005, it was worth $1.20 CAD.

Using the example above, my $1497.50 USD commission check was only worth $1797.00 CAD in January 2005 – a whopping $599.00 LESS than it was worth in late 2001.

Affiliate marketers in many other parts of the world faced the same scenario with foreign currency fluctuations.

Here are some examples of how the US dollar has been performing against various currencies since early 2002.

British Pound
January 2002 – 0.698241 GBP
January 2003 – 0.618284 GBP
January 2004 – 0.547846 GBP
January 14, 2005 – 0.53124 British Pound

Australian Dollar
January 2002 – 1.93418 AUD
January 2003 – 1.71592 AUD
January 2004 – 1.29591 AUD
January 14, 2005 – 1.30581 Australian Dollar

Euro
January 2002 – 1.13226 EUR
January 2003 – 0.941605 EUR
January 2004 – 0.791328 EUR
January 14, 2005 – 0.75643 Euro

Those were fairly sizeable drops across the board… and a pretty depressing situation for non-U.S.-based affiliates who earn their incomes in US dollars.

However, there are a couple of things affiliate marketers can do to protect their affiliate income from foreign currency fluctuations.

The first option is to work about 25-35% harder to bolster revenues to 2001 equivalent values. However, because I'm basically lazy, working harder is never my first choice.

The second option involves using foreign exchange rate changes to your advantage by selling products offered by merchants located in your own country, priced in your own currency.

For example, although Canadians are less resistant to purchasing in U.S. dollars when the Canadian dollar is so strong, they still hate to see a $120.00 charge on their credit card for a $100.00 item. Logic aside, something tells you that a buck should be a buck, and anything more feels like a rip-off.

The primary benefit of promoting ‘local merchants' is to help your visitors save money by reducing shipping costs and eliminating customs duties on goods imported from the U.S. Basically, most of us prefer to shop locally if we can get the same product at the same or lower price.

Your task then is to find merchants who price products and pay their affiliates in your own currency.

That unfortunately is still easier said than done. The pickings were pretty slim when I searched Google for “Canadian” and “affiliate programs”. A site that listed itself as a directory of Canadian affiliate programs – wasn't. Furthermore, most of the Canadian merchants that set Canadian dollar prices on their sites, either pay their affiliates in U.S. dollars or are affiliated with networks that pay affiliates in US dollars.

U.K. affiliates will have an easier time finding U.K.-based merchants that pay in Pounds Sterling.

Here's something to watch for if you decide to affiliate with merchants who work in your own currency.

At CJ.com, I discovered that if you promote the Canadian Shopping Channel which sells and pays the commission in Canadian dollars, your commissions are first converted to U.S. dollars for CJ’s purposes, then back into to Canadian dollars when they deposit the commissions in your Canadian dollar bank account. By result, you’d lose money each time the commission went through the exchange process.

To avoid being penalized by currency exchanges before your commission check hits your bank, I suggest setting up a separate Commission Junction account just for affiliations with your local merchants. Be sure to set the functional currency on that account to your country's currency.

U.S. affiliates can also take advantage of drops in the U.S. dollar by selling for foreign-based merchants. When or if the U.S. dollar drops, you will actually get a raise on each of those promotions.

Expand your reach by taking advantage of any and all opportunities at home and abroad. It is the WORLD-WIDE web after all.

Did you find this post about foreign currency fluctuations informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question, or suggestion, please leave a comment below!

Cheers,
sig-ros

How to Prevent Sudden Earnings Collapse

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What would you do if your affiliate earnings suddenly dropped from $50,000 per month to $2,000 per month; or from $2,000 per month to absolutely no income at all?

How would you pay your super-sized mortgage and auto loans?

Never mind trivial items like shelter and transportation – who's going to pay the groceries? Your mother-in-law? Forget it. She always knew you should get a ‘real job' and now she's going to lord it all over you.

Don't think that such catastrophes can't or don't happen.

They can and they do.

Merchants go belly-up and the commission checks stop arriving.

Products become obsolete or illegal, and entire markets disappear. (Remember BETA video cassette players? They didn't even make good boat anchors.)

For example, let's consider the implications of the following news release from the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) in the United States, “DEA Unveils International Toll-Free Hotline to Report Illegal Prescription Drug Sales and Rogue Pharmacies Operating on the Internet“.

Read the full press release.

At issue here are doctors who prescribe drugs without seeing patients in person. It's a downright dangerous practice, and the medical questionnaires on pharmaceutical web sites don't begin to solve the problem.

As a result, doctors and online pharmacies in several states had fines levied against them, and some pharmacies have had their licenses lost or revoked.

OK, but how does that affect you as an affiliate?

Well, here's a post I found on the RXAffiliateForum with the subject line “My Conversation with the FBI“.

“I spoke with the Special agent in charge for the southeastern region for INTERNET pharmacies. I was told in no uncertain terms it is illegal to dispense medications without a doctor/patient relationship. The FBI, DEA and other regulatory and enforcement agencies are investigating all websites that operate in this fashion.”

“In addition there is no distinction between websites (read ‘affiliate websites'), Ops (Online pharmacies) and pharmacies. Just a heads up.”

Just a ‘heads up', indeed!

Here's another post that I found at the same forum.

“I've taken HUGE losses in the OP (Online Pharmacy) industry. ABC Merchant Site (name changed) owes me over $15,000! And XYZ Merchant Site (name changed) owes me over $5000! …There are people who have lost 2, 3, 4… even 5 times the amount that I have! And I've lost over $20,000! If you read through old posts on this forum, you will find TONS of people in the same boat. Some people have even taken legal action… but very few have got any money.”

After those online pharmacies pay their fines, there probably isn't much left to cover their affiliates' commission checks.

According to Richard A. Chapo, Esq. of AdultInternetLaw.com, “it is clear that affiliates of online pharmacies can be prosecuted in states such as Nevada”.

Mr. Chapo encourages webmasters of online pharmacies to “review the programs they are promoting to make sure that they are not in conflict with the Controlled Substance Acts of various states, such as Nevada. There is little doubt that the industry will see many more prosecutions in this area of the online industry.”

Scarey, huh? Yes, but the point is not to scare you away from affiliate marketing.

The point is that there are potential ‘problems' with any business arena you may want to enter. You simply need to be both cautious and aware.

So, what's the prescription for protecting yourself from sudden earnings collapse?

Well, just like you can't expect to stay healthy or thrive on a steady diet of cake, neither should you hope to maintain or grow an affiliate business with a single type of product.

There are thousands of merchants with affiliate programs, and tens of thousands of products in different markets from which to choose, so start choosing. Expand and diversify your product range and build a solid and healthy affiliate business!

In other words, hedge your bets – and no, that doesn't necessarily mean that you should promote online casinos. 🙂

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