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How to Make Affiliate Marketing Work for Your Business

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Tara Hornor

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Many affiliate marketing programs claim users can make thousands of dollars a month by doing nothing. Sure, there are a few big-time marketers and businesses that have made wads of cash through affiliate marketing, but this is the exception. Many programs claim marketing through affiliate programs are a piece of cake, but for every affiliate marketing success, thousands of businesses have failed to make a dime.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right for Your Business?

Most businesses engage affiliate marketers as a strategy to extend their reach. To attract quality affiliates you’ll need to offer high commissions on sales, but this can cut deeply into your profits. Depending upon your margins, your business may be able to support affiliates or you may find it more effective to market on your own.

If you can’t support affiliates, you might consider performing the affiliate marketing role on your own. If you have a strong market or a strong marketing background and your firm has the capabilities, find other products and services that you can market alongside yours. This is a perfectly acceptable affiliate marketing arrangement that benefits you, your customers, and the other companies involved. Some companies actually start out by marketing affiliate products to build a market while they’re still working on their own product line to offer.

You may consider this if you find that you cannot currently create these extra products and services your customers want. For example, you may want to sell insurance for your products. Instead of self-insuring, you could simply sell insurance as an affiliate, make a little money, and everybody wins.

How to Make Affiliate Marketing Work

Not every business can effectively use affiliate marketing. If no one in your company can focus efforts entirely on affiliate marketing for a couple of days a week, maybe affiliate marketing programs aren’t for you. Affiliate marketing isn’t about sitting back and collecting money. It does involve work – and lots of it. Here are a few tips for success in affiliate marketing:

  • Send massive amounts of traffic to affiliate websites.
  • Associate with reputable affiliate programs only.
  • Look for programs that pay high commission rates.
  • Look for programs with products you’d want to buy.
  • Create relevant content for affiliate programs.

Relevant Content is Essential to Affiliate Marketing Success

Relevant content is vital to the success of any affiliate marketing plan. Choose affiliate marketing programs in line with the type of content offered. For instance, if the content on a site is about dogs, visitors would not be drawn to click affiliate links to chocolate or shoes. Neither is relevant or related to the subject that attracted the visitors.

Also, blend affiliate program links with content but not deceptively. The affiliate links should be in keeping with the general flow of a page. Otherwise, affiliate links will appear out of place. But don’t forget you can use affiliate marketing with more than a link-based program. Learn to upsell other products and services that may be of benefit that you market as an affiliate.

Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing

Before starting out with affiliate programs, it is essential to read up and glean from the success of others. There is a great deal of information online about affiliate programs. Don’t be taken in by get rich quick books or blogs promising millions. Steer clear of outrageous claims and put your nose to the grindstone. Scour the web for reliable resources and test different programs.

Some types of affiliate programs are effective for some sites, while other programs work better for other types of sites. Experimentation is necessary to find your sweet spot. Don’t expect to be an overnight success. It takes knowledge, time, and effort to succeed with affiliate marketing programs. Succeeding with affiliate marketing can be an exercise in trial and error, but it can be worth it in the end.

Author’s Bio:
Tara Hornor writes about marketing, advertising, branding, web and graphic design, and desktop publishing for PrintPlace.com a company that offers online printing for print marketing media. Find her on Twitter as @TaraHornor .

 

3 Mistakes and 3 Essentials of Blog Marketing

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By Pawel Reszka

Still think blogging is the exclusive territory of hipsters and chronic over-sharers? Think again! Blogging is a money-making powerhouse – that is, assuming you monetize your blog correctly in the first place. To understand the right ways – and the wrong ways – to monetize your blog, let’s look at some of the most common mistakes beginning bloggers make when it comes to cashing in.

Mistake #1 – Not Investing Time in Your Blog

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Blogging isn’t an “if you build it, they will come,” type of game. According to BlogPulse, there were nearly 156 million blogs online at the beginning of 2011 and that number continues to grow every day. Simply registering a domain name and installing WordPress isn’t enough to attract visitors and guarantee sales in this competitive marketplace.

So although this first mistake doesn’t specifically relate to the monetization models you implement on your blog, it’s worth remembering that it doesn’t matter how great your advertising strategy is if you don’t have any traffic coming to your site. Whether you decide to pursue guest blogging, blog commenting or a number of other traffic generation strategies, keep in mind that investing time in growing your blog and your audience is the first key to effective monetization.

Mistake #2 – Poorly Chosen Advertising Models

Of course, getting visitors to your site won’t guarantee sales – to do that, you need to choose the most effective monetization models for your blog.

One of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make is simply tossing up a few Adsense blocks and assuming that counts as a monetization strategy. It’s not that Adsense won’t earn you money, as there are certainly internet marketers out there earning six figures through this program. It’s that Adsense, in general, is the lowest possible form of income for most blogs. Here’s why…

First of all, it’s incredibly difficult to make Adsense ads look like they’re a part of your site and not just some tacky blocks of advertising scamming up your pages. Very few people manage to achieve this integration in a subtle, sophisticated way – for most bloggers, Adsense ads are always going to look like, well, ads. This detracts from your blog’s message and discourages people from returning to your site in the future.

Even more importantly, Adsense represents one of the lowest possible payouts in the blog monetization worlds. Assuming someone clicks through on one of your ads, you earn a few pennies – maybe a dollar or two, if you’re lucky. But then you’ve lost that visitor for good. There’s no way you can convert that visitor into a long-term, high-value customer since they’ve left your blog through the Adsense link. For these reasons, most bloggers would be well-advised to steer clear of Adsense entirely!

Simply placing affiliate banners indiscriminately throughout your site isn’t much more effective. If you decide to promote affiliate products, they should be integrated into your site in a holistic way. Maybe you recommend a particular product as a part of a tutorial, or maybe you demonstrate using a particular affiliate product in a video. By providing context for the sale, your visitor will be much more likely to purchase than if you simply paste a banner into the sidebar of your site.

Mistake #3 – Failing to Capture Visitors

But no matter how well you integrate affiliate promotions into your blog, they still aren’t the strongest way to monetize your site.

This is because Adsense ads and affiliate banners represent a “one off” relationship with your readers, where you’re essentially limiting the potential of each visitor to the value of one sale. For example, if you use Adsense banners on your site, you’re hoping to generate one clickthrough per visitor; or, if you place random affiliate advertisements throughout your blog, you’re hoping to generate one sale per person.

The secret to earning money through blogging is that the potential value of each visitor can be much, much higher if you take the time to set up your site as a complete sales funnel.

Rather than copy and paste the technical definitions of “sales funnel” and “back-end sales,” let me give you an example…

A visitor stops by your blog and likes what he sees. Your writing style is good and your free content is valuable, so he decides to subscribe to your email list. As a bonus, he receives a free report that you delivered as an incentive to sign up. Inside this bonus is an affiliate link or a sales message for your product or service, which results in the first sale for you.

But that isn’t the end of your relationship with this visitor. Because he’s now a part of your email list, he receives regular notifications about your newest blog posts, some of which promote other affiliate products or your own products/services.

He’s also notified whenever you launch a new product or service, and because you know he likes your work, he’s much more likely to buy your latest promotion (and their related upsells) than a cold lead who’s visiting your blog for the first time. Over time, this relationship can result in hundreds or thousands of dollars of product purchases and upsells.

Sure beats earning a few cents off of an Adsense clickthrough, doesn’t it?!

Of course, it’s one thing to say that a well-built sales funnel is the key to monetizing a blog correctly –it’s another thing entirely to actually do it! So let’s take a look at the most important features of a back-end sales funnel.

Sales Funnel Essential #1 – Email List

Although it’s possible to set up a simple funnel without an email list (in most cases, the sale of a product leads to one or more “one time offers” for higher priced products or services), maintaining a list of potential buyers and communicating with them regularly makes it easier to convert one-time blog visitors into buyers and to generate repeat sales from these customers.

Sales Funnel Essential #2 – Your Own Product

Generating affiliate sales can be a good way to earn money off your blog, but having your own product (whether that’s an ebook, video training course or coaching program) is where the real money lies. Yes, there are some greater administrative demands compared with simply promoting affiliate programs, but ultimately, you’ll earn more when you control the distribution of your product versus sending your visitors to someone else’s sales funnel.

Plus, considering how easy it is to outsource writing, video editing and other forms of product creation these days, there’s no excuse not to have your own product!

Sales Funnel Essential #3 – An Upsell

Once you’ve convinced someone to purchase your product, don’t drop the ball by ending the transaction there. You know that the buyer is interested in your products or services, so why not encourage them to spend more with a well-chosen, high-quality upsell?

If you sell an info product, consider offering a “premium” version of your product with more resources and tools. Or, if you sell a service, offer a package deal or complementary service to avoid leaving money on the table.

By taking the time to correctly build out your sales funnel, you ensure that the time you’ve invested into your blog hasn’t gone to waste. Just remember – you don’t have to implement all of these elements at once. You can add them over time, but the faster you complete your funnel, the faster you’ll start making more sales!

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Pawel Reszka is an internet marketer who runs Affhelper.com, a blog where he shares some valuable tips about affiliate marketing and making money online. Check out his site for super affiliate techniques and strategies.

Thanks, Pawel. Useful information on affiliate marketing is always valuable.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Affiliate Marketing Myths — Myth 2: It’s Best to Start with a Crash Course

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In this time of a down economy, who couldn’t do with another income stream? Those of who’ve been online for a few weeks or longer, realize that not every offer of income potential is quite what it seems to be.

James Nardell and his team at Shopster have been writing a series on myths bloggers have about affiliate marketing. This is the second in that series to help us all avoid some potholes on the information highway. (Does anyone still call it that?)

Myth 2: It’s Best to Start Affiliate Marketing with a Crash Course
A Guest Post by Raymond Lau

Is a crash course from a leading affiliate the best way to ramp up fast on affiliate marketing techniques?

Sort of. When looking for a crash course in affiliate marketing, the key words are “buyer beware”. While it is entirely possible to learn good fundamentals from a beginner’s course, there are many resources out there that are either misleading, out of date, or entirely loony.

A misleading technique is one that worked for someone, once, under circumstances they either cannot reproduce or cannot adequately expand. Avoiding this is as simple as doing your homework: look back at the history of the technique itself, and who is presenting it. The best business is built upon a stable foundation that can adapt to changes in the market. Learning the processes and habits of a fluke will only lead to troubles down the road.

An out-of-date technique is just as useless to you when starting out. Changes in affiliate marketing happen all the time, and as a beginner you simply cannot afford to start your business without a step ahead of the competition. Why even bother entering the race in the middle of the pack, where business winds down to the lowest bidder? Affiliate marketing is about innovation.

Of course, among the throngs of dead ends there are some shining examples of solid, easily-accessible courses from people who know what they’re doing. They’re not that hard to find (hah, they’d better not be!) and it takes virtually no time to get started with their guides.

Some are free, like the “Affiliate Masters” guide by Ken Evoy (http://aff-masters.sitesell.com/AffMasters.pdf) which thoroughly covers the potential beginning of your affiliate marketing life and provides a wealth of links to other solid resources.

Others, such as the Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook by James Martell, or Rosalind Gardner’s How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online, require an up-front investment but come with backup support and counseling by the authors themselves, allowing for a much more personal experience that may more thoroughly ingrain the fundamentals.

Whether you go for the free route or decide to pay for the information, there are three simple questions to ensure that what you’re learning will help you and your business:

1. Does it suit you? Look into the history of who is teaching and what they are saying. Make a judgment on whether or not what they’re teaching can be adapted to the markets you want to enter.

2. Is it stale? It’s one thing to learn a stable set of basics, and another entirely to clog your brain with dated information that has been reworked and improved upon since it first came out. Research the techniques offered to confirm they’re still relevant to today’s market.

3. What do you expect? Just because the course you’re taking promises to teach you the solid how-tos of affiliate marketing, don’t go in thinking you’ll get rich quick. By now you should know that “instant profit” is only made by people taking advantage of others who are looking for it.

–Resource box–
Raymond Lau is a marketing analyst for Shopster.com — a company that provides Web sellers with a dropship product source and e-Commerce storefront tools to build their online business. Shopster gives retailers and affiliates access to over 1 million products they can sell on auction sites or their own storefront. You can reach him at rlau@shopster.com.
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Thanks, James and Raymond!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Affiliate Marketing Myths — Myth 1: Affiliate Marketing Is Easy

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Recently, I got to know James Nardell of Shopster. We spent quite some time discussing his business and how it works. It’s an interesting model, but I have no tangible products to sell. However, James and his team are a wealth of information about work with affiliates. So I asked if his team would write a series of blog posts on myths and misconceptions bloggers have about affiliate marketing and how it works. This is the first in that series.

Myth 1: Affiliate Marketing Is Easy
A Guest Post by Raymond Lau

First off, no business is easy. If it were easy and you could make good money doing it, everyone would be doing it. Any successful business requires two things: hard work and risk.

In the early days of search marketing, affiliate marketing was a relatively easy and low cost technique for generating revenue. It was cheaper to buy traffic and easier to optimize rankings in Google. There were fewer rules to follow and Google wasn’t in competition with affiliates. Advertisers weren’t adopting search marketing tactics whereas affiliates were giving it a whirl.

“Affiliate marketing has evolved and it’s difficult for newcomers to jump in without any capital and start making money,” says Chris Finken of OrangeSoda — a successful affiliate and search marketing company.

Times have changed for the affiliate marketer, but search engines are still the best way for people to find what they’re looking for online. For the affiliate, traffic-generation techniques have been focusing blogging. “Blogs remain a popular tool for affiliate marketing ‘on the cheap’ “, Finken says. Still, he warns about no- or low-cost Web publishing tools.

Affiliate marketers can’t just set up junk blogs, plug them with poorly written (or completely spammy) content and expect to start generating leads. Think about it¦ If that’s all that was required, no one would hire affiliate marketers. Companies could easily do that themselves.

Blogs are spider food. They are constantly updated with targeted content. They are exactly what search engines are looking for. If affiliate marketers spend the time writing decent blog posts, optimizing them for keywords, focusing on some SEO tactics, they can generate visitor traffic.

To make money, prospective affiliate marketers have to consider four things:

    1. Proper perspective. Affiliate marketing as a side gig or hobby is increasingly difficult due to time and cash commitment needed to attract and retain shoppers that are referred to marketers.

    2. Money. You need hard dollars to invest in site design, SEO, and paid search advertisements. Your site won’t sell itself.

    3. Competitive advantage. You need to compete with HUGE sites like www.fatwallet.com (multiple value propositions to their members) and www.revtrax.com (taking affiliate marketing directly to customers who shop in stores — allowing marketers to track and reward the affiliate for store-based purchases). What do you offer?

    4. A marketer’s temperament. You have to be willing to try stuff and fail. For everything that works, there’s going to be way more that doesn’t. You have to be up on the current techniques, be aware of upcoming strategies, and have a firm understanding of your competition.

The bottom line:
Marketers want affiliates to innovate into new distribution points that they don’t know about or cannot access. That can take time, money, and hard work.

–Resource box–
Raymond Lau is a marketing analyst for Shopster.com — a company that provides Web sellers with a dropship product source and e-Commerce storefront tools to build their online business. Shopster gives retailers and affiliates access to over 1 million products they can sell on auction sites or their own storefront. You can reach him at rlau@shopster.com.
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Thanks, James and Raymond!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

A True Lesson in Affiliate Selling

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It’s Not a Trick

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I had to think about about this post before I wrote it. It’s a bit out of my usual niche. When I talk about business and making money, I don’t know much about affiliate selling or “make money online blogging.”

Last night I read an in-depth report that Patricia Mayo did on information products that proclaim they’ll teach you how to make money online. Near the end, she gave a link to a price-controlled viral product that offers a tool, not information, for free.

I followed the link. What I found was what she described. I thought hard about whether I should blog it. Obviously, I’ve decided to pass it on to you.

A True Lesson in Affiliate Selling

My reason for sharing this information tool is the mastery with which it is put together. I keep thinking about how, step-by-step, this offer does everything to make it easy to buy. It’s state of the art online selling — done so seamlessly that the solid principles behind it would be easy to miss. It’s not a trick. It provides a true lesson in affiliate selling. Here’s why I say that.

A great selling model has these parts: the product and the offer.

A Great Product has low development costs, yet offers high value in many ways.

  • The product has critical mass.
  • It saves time.
  • It’s compelling.
  • It makes life easier.
  • It offers something immediately actionable.
  • It fits my life.

A Great Offer is about customers, has high barrier to competition, and high chance of going viral.

  • The language is conversational.
  • The sales model is transparent.
  • You know the product before you buy.
  • It’s fast and easy to buy.
  • No one asks for your email information.
  • You keep your profits.
  • The sense of the model is easy to see.

You might find it a bit complicated to go from one hyperlink to another. However, I think you’ll also find that the offer itself lives up to what I describe. It’s an effective model. I’d love to see the figures on it.

I’ll never be the consummate affiliate marketer, I don’t have the discipline for that sort of selling. I’ll never be an engineer, a ballerina, or live on a submarine either. Still, I recognize state of the art work when I see it.

I’d be interested in whether you agree.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Be the best at what you do! Work with Liz!! SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Have a plan!! Register now!