June 22, 2009 By

Affinity of Affiliate Marketing

Internet has emerged as one of the biggest revenue generation source in the past few years. It has surpassed other traditional mediums of advertising and revenue generation. The major credit goes to Affiliate Marketing programmes.

affiliate-marketing

Photo Credit: Affiliate Bob

For affiliate marketing programs to be successful, it is important to increase the brand loyalty of internet users to your website. Building up user loyalty and creating a positive outlook towards your blog is one of the stepping stones to make big bucks online. Here comes the role of Affinity Targeting which aims at creating an affinity towards your website and the affiliate programs running on it.

The sense of affinity is a great medium to increase the traffic onto your website and hence increasing the conversion ratio. This is only possible when a website can command a competitive advantage over its competing websites by implementing pay per clicks, SEO to increase affiliates and creating a positive attitude towards online advertising enabling a wider audience reach.

Few steps to create affinity towards your affiliate marketing programs include;

  • Building up visitor trust by publishing unique content and showcasing its benefits.
  • Regular posting and increasing the site’s visibility on the web are the harbingers of sustained user loyalty.
  • Usability should be the main focus as a site which is easily navigable and not at all cluttered builds up an enjoying experience for the user.
    It is also significantly important for a brand/site to command loyalty and have the potential to emerge as one of the best names on the web. Professionals are hence on a lookout for innovative techniques to boost up their affiliate sales. Therefore, it is important to create Brand Affinity and work in tandem with your partners or affiliates to enhance the customer value.

Marketing Service Talk explains this further by mentioning four ways to work with brands;

  1. Brand Affinity – working with other brands to change perception and generate awareness for your brand;
  2. Partnership Marketing – tactical short term marketing initiatives, consisting of promotional or third party tie-ups;
  3. Affinity Marketing – Adding value to your brand via a complementary service from another brand e.g affinity credit cards;
  4. Affiliate Marketing – white labeling your product or service to others to sell for commissions such as Moneysupermarket, U Switch.

In the early days of affiliate marketing, it was looked upon as an unprofitable source of income. But with newer business models coming in, such as pay per performance and other affiliate business models by creating an online partnership with firms and thus determining their revenue sharing allotments, the internet marketing environment has evolved. Websites such as PepperJam have become one of the best in the business. Alanna Richter, VP – Marketing of NY based Bluefly says,

“Affiliate marketing is one of the company’s least expensive acquisition tools and we are always on the lookout for high-traffic sites touting visitors with relevant demographics and psychographics”.

For websites to increase online revenue generation, it is good to know that affiliate marketing is here to stay and grow. The key lies in understanding the nuances involved and implementing them successfully. For an affiliate marketing program to be successful, it is important to know the advantages and disadvantages of the same.

Few advantages;

  • Brand Images can be changed and new perceptions formed.
  • Affiliates help launch new products and services often exploring into new target audiences with the help of Affinity Targeting.
  • Online partnerships with relevant partners/sites increase the visibility helping more money to come in.
  • Marketing costs are shared and profits increase.

Few disadvantages;

  • It is difficult to find good online partners to indulge into online advertising.
  • Profit sharing and responsibility sharing in various deals is always a debatable issue.
  • Control over the communiqué is one of the major decision factors.

Affinity towards affiliate marketing programs is here to stay big time and its potential and profitability is still unleashed.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
May 24, 2009 By

ClickBank Encoded Hoplinks Prevent Affiliate Theft

clickbank hoplink

ClickBank has been making tons of changes recently, including a new design which seems more “modern” than their old look. However some of the important changes were more than just cosmetic.

For example, as I was trying to get an affiliate link for Simply PLR today, I expected to see the usual hoplink format which is your affiliate ID followed by the publisher id and the rest of clickbank.net URL.

What I found however is the new encoded hoplink format, which solves the age old problem of affiliate commission theft from ClickBank products. There has been tons of third-part applications for encoding or masking affiliate links, but it’s good to see that ClickBank has FINALLY made it part of the default features.

Of course affiliate theft can still happen, but it’s much more difficult now.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: , , ,
January 3, 2009 By

Premium WordPress Theme Affiliate Programs Suck

If you’ve ever promoted premium WordPress themes and have made money with them, congratulations. Consider however, you could have made a lot more money promoting some other product from your blog!

Although I have made at least $300-$400 a month promoting Brian Gardner’s themes in the past, that’s really an exception because (1) he had the quality and the quantity (2) I used rather “creative” affiliate marketing methods.

While Brian can be credited with starting this whole premium theme craze, his predecessors have done a much shabbier job. Here’s my 3 biggest complaints of premium WordPress themes affiliate programs:

  • They Suck at Selling – A lot of themes out there are great, but they do not let visitors know exactly what they would get, and exactly how their offer is different from the huge amount of “premium” themes being regurgitated in the market. Their product pages focus one the demo of the theme, but that’s as far as it gets. You don’t need a 12-page long salespage, but the selling point and the USP just has to be there of they are wasting my time and yours.
  • They Pay Peanuts – 20% commissions for your hard work? Come on it has to be a joke. Some theme creators to their credit offer up to 40% commissions, but even that is much lower to some of the good, high-converting products you can find in ClickBank. The fact is, they are selling a digital product with zero delivery cost and no substantial increment cost. The low commissions is just a lack of recognition to the power of affiliates.
  • They Provide Almost No Marketing Help – Most of them provide no banners, no email templates, and close to zero marketing help. Could this be because they pretty much don’t get what this “marketing” thing is all about?

It’s almost sad to see the amount of hard-working affiliates working their asses off to make money with these affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing is simple:

Good Product + Converting Salespage + High Commissions / Sale

Leaving out any part of the formula simply results in a waste of time, space and effort for you, as an affiliate. Look around, find better offers. That space on your blog and that small AdWords ad could be making you a lot richer than you are now.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , ,
December 29, 2008 By

Affiliate Marketing During a Recession

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the world is into one of the deepest recessionary slumps for the moment and it is going to continue this way for some time. But, it does take some brain storming to understand the business opportunities in this recession period. The emergence of click only companies has made brick and mortar companies suffer in their businesses and this has resulted in a decrement in their profitability.

So, the question springs up, what is the best business to be in now? Bet me on this, the answer is Affiliate Marketing.

This is the time where affiliate marketers actually can earn as much as they desire just because the payment depends on the performance. Also, the products being promoted can be ordered via online shopping which is actually a booming business presently.

The best of the reasons for online shopping catching pace is because it is a cost effective way and a competitive one as well. There have also been various polls being conducted which have emphasized the importance of affiliate marketing through SEO during the recession. There are various internet marketing strategies which can also be followed successfully.

Aojon describes it in one of his posts as -

When the market goes up, spend more on advertising.

When the market goes down, spend as much as you possibly can on advertising.

Few other strategies which affiliates should implement in times of recession to come out successful:

  • Target the niche users always helps as there increases the chance of a focused search by a prospective customer who is desperate and has the drive to generate sales for him/her and profits for you.
  • Increase in conversions and traffic also plays an important role and there comes in effect the role of proper promotional efforts for your product. It is worth remembering that this is a ‘numbers game’ and the more efforts you put in, the more numbers you get.
  • Focus more on PPC because there could be a decrease in the final sales of a product, but there would always be focused searches. So, the scope of earning money through pay per click should be well grasped upon.
  • Improve networking in these times with fellow bloggers, websites, community forums etc. as these people would be of help when the recession ends. On the recovery, you could be in a good position to capitalize on the surge in spending. Nevertheless, always keep in mind the target market of yours while interacting and making friends.

All said and done, it could also be the right time to change the design of your site and make it more attractive. Always remember, “Looks do Sell”. Also essential is to understand the fact that there cannot be a mercurial rise in the market conditions in the near future, thus it is time to focus and strategize in a better and effective way. Stress more on the volume which can be generated and keep a close eye on the present rends with the decline in spending all across the globe.

Implement these and I hope to see you smiling all through the recession.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , ,
December 26, 2008 By

The Future of Internet Marketing

As Market-Vantage aptly puts

Internet Marketing is the process of using the interactive technologies available via the Internet to further create a dialog with potential customers by connecting with them with good educational content about your company’s products or service offerings.

1 “Change” is the keyword of every practice and Internet Marketing has also evolved over the years. There has been a sudden burst of click only companies and the success shows that there are a lot of revenues that people have generated. The future of online marketing has been a hot debate topic for quite some time now, but nevertheless, it seems bright.

The online marketing business has grown by leaps and bounds and as this digital revolution keeps growing, the motive behind it has not changed one bit from consumer marketing. The motive has and will remain the same i.e. increasing awareness about your product or service, tracking potential customers and creating value for them. But without doubt, the approach has seen a sea change; be it the way we do business, the way we market, service , sell, communicate, distribute, and work.

The future of online marketing may have the following implementations;

  • There will be a transformation from static sites to personalized and dynamic sites which would more effectively enable actual e-commerce. Investment worth millions of dollars in an online business would not raise eye-brows.
  • Search Personalization, SEO, rankings and search results will have specially devised internet marketing strategies which will generate more revenue for both the client and the company. This would obviously mean new advertising methods being implemented for the success of the same. This would further result in diversification of strategies and focus on a combination of strategies and advertising models. The concept of 4C’s of Internet Marketing will actually be implemented.
  • The corporate citizens across the globe will operate in new digital marketplace wherein almost all e-commerce applications such as shopping, paying bills, entertainment, and banking everywhere will be dealt online. The harbingers of some of these applications have already been implemented in some developed continents.
  • The problems of spam, frauds, phishing scams and identity theft concerns will continue, but strict measures will be implemented. This would lead to a reduction in display of banner ads, PPC methods, click frauds etc. Another important concept will be the upsurge in information publishing and copyright of free copyright articles.
  • The achievement of Marketing ROI will become more difficult as there would be a plethora of similar services being offered by many sites. This would further result in increased competition which may go the unethical way at times.

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The future might also have many surprises in store when it comes to internet marketing strategies, promotional activities, functional specifications etc. but one thing is for sure, there seems to be very less saturation in the online marketing sphere in the few decades to come. Making money online would not remain a secret anymore and internet marketing would evolve to be something more than just another business tool. The internet and internet marketing would probably become more than “OUR LIVES”.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
May 26, 2008 By

Ninja Affiliate Plugin – Turn Keywords Into Affiliate Links!

NinjaAff-eCoverMedium Pawan Agarwal, who has previously released a lot of free plugins including the Max Banner Ads and the Psychic Search Plugin (among others) has been working his magic once again. This time, the result is Ninja Affiliate, a special WordPress plugin that lets you:

  • Convert any keyword in your blog into an affiliate link
  • Manage the amount of converted keywords / page
  • Manage and track unlimited links, with link cloaking
  • Create professional-looking redirect links
  • Enter affiliate links directly while writing a post

Ninja Affiliate is (pardon my bluntness) a much more advance version of similar affiliate marketing plugins for WordPress. One main advantage is complete, logical control over the amount of keywords converted. All the other tools make your blog look like a link farm, Ninja Affiliate does not.

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Plus, you can assign multiple links to the same keyword, something which no other plugin or software is able to do. You can also choose to add a “no-follow” tag to your links if you don’t want to give up Google Juice via your affiliate links.

This is a really important tool for any blogger currently using WordPress, and with Ninja Affiliate you can easily put your blog monetization on autopilot. For the creative, you can also sell keyword links to advertisers or just use it as a tool to improve interlinking between your blog post or between different blogs.

In fact you can do just about anything you want. Sky’s the limit :)

More Info: Ninja Affiliate for WordPress

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , ,
May 4, 2008 By

Super Affiliate Blogger by Gobala Krishnan

This is the video presentation from our second Mastermind session, where I speak about making money online from blogging and affiliate marketing. The video is split into 2 parts, and I’ve also included the actual presentation slides I used during the presentation.

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Filed Under: Podcast & Videos, Seminars & Events Tagged With: ,
March 7, 2008 By

How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

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In our third teleseminar session, we cover everything about making money online with affiliate programs, also termed as affiliate marketing. And what a great call it was, with over 50 participants and although I got disconnected twice and had to call back, we did manage to record all the way to the end of the call except for the last 2 minutes.

Overall, you can learn a lot about affiliate from the existing 42+ minutes of audio. The best way to learn from audio recordings is to play it on your MP3 player /iPod and relax, don’t do anything else while you’re listening except maybe writing down important point on a piece of paper.

Melvin Ng joins in half way as a guest, and helps to give some tips as well as answer some questions about affiliate marketing. Here’s what we discussed in the call:

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

  • What is an affiliate program?
  • How does an affiliate program work?
  • How does it track the sales?
  • How do you get paid?

Different Type of Affiliate Programs

  • Categorized by Payment type
    • Pay-per-sale
    • Pay-per-lead
    • Pay-per-click
  • Categorized by Product Type
    • Physical Products
    • Digital Products (ebook, software, membership sites)
    • Services / Leads
  • Categorized by Payment Levels
    • Single-tier affiliate programs
    • Two-tier affiliate programs
    • Multi-level affiliate programs

Where to Sign-up For Affiliate Programs

How to Promote Affiliate Programs

  • Using your site / blog
  • Using paid traffic and Google Adwords
  • Using email signatures and forum signatures
  • How to get an advantage over other affiliates
  • How to convert more traffic into sales
  • Much, much more..
Filed Under: make money online, Podcast & Videos Tagged With: , ,
August 15, 2007 By

My First Aweber Affiliate Program Commission Check

aweber-check1.jpg

I got my first Aweber affiliate commission check in the mail today, for $21.54. This brings to my attention a very important message for all affiliate marketers out there – not all affiliate products are created equal!

Some products are always more difficult to sell than others.

My Aweber checks says it all. $21.54 is not bad considering it’s an additional stream of residual income, but considering it’s a tool that most people reading this blog will eventually need, it’s quite lame. I expected to make more sales for the Aweber affiliate program considering that it’s an excellent product, but as I said not all affiliate programs are created equal.

My conversion for the Aweber affiliate program is less than 0.8%. Most of my other products (even some affiliate products) convert at more than 3%.

I started promoting Aweber early 2006 when I switched to them and was extremely satisfied with their service. Here’s a few reasons I can think of to explain my low Aweber commissions:

  • Most of my blog readers already have it
  • Most of my blog readers are using a similar competitive product
  • Most of my blog readers are reluctant to invest in it

From my experience, is extremely difficult to promote these products on the front-end as an affiliate:

  • Recurring Memberships – Recurring payment programs are always more difficult to sell than one-time payment products. Don’t ask me why, that’s just the way it is!
  • Backend / Support Systems – Things like an autoresponder, shopping cart system, support system etc are more difficult to sell because people have switching costs and they may already be using a similar program.
  • Business Opportunity / MLM – People tend to be more skeptical about MLM opportunities. Plus, each sign-up you make for an MLM program pays much less because of the commissions that need to be paid to your upline.
  • $7 Products – It’s not difficult to sell unless you’re using paid advertising, because the income may exceed the expenditure. Seven dollars is not a whole lot of margin to play around with. The exception is if it’s YOUR product, and the One Time Offer converts well. (Do the maths: at $7 you can only afford 70 clicks @ 10 cents per click before your campaign become unprofitable)

Products like the one I mention above should not be promoted front-end, but they do make a great affiliate products for back-end profits. In other words, don’t do an Adwords campaign or other paid advertising on them. Instead, built your list or blog, or sell your own product and then promote them to your existing customers.

A repeat blog visitor costs you nothing. An email sent to your list is free.

It’s a smarter affiliate marketing strategy!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: ,