Friday, April 19, 2013

Affiliate Marketing


What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a process in which merchants offer compensation to a partner when the partner generates traffic, leads or sales on behalf of the merchant.Perhaps the simplest way to explain affiliate marketing is that it is a way of making money online whereby you as a publisher are rewarded for helping a business by promoting their product, service or site.
There are a number of forms of these types of promotions but in most cases they involve you as a publisher earning a commission when someone follows a link on your blog to another site where they then buy something.
Other variations on this are where you earn an amount for referring a visitor who takes some kind of action – for example when they sign up for something and give an email address, where they complete a survey, where they leave a name and address etc.
Commissions are often a percentage of a sale but can also be a fixed amount per conversion.
Conversions are generally tracked when the publisher (you) uses a link with a code only being used by you embedded into it that enables the advertiser to track where conversions come from (usually by cookies). Other times an advertiser might give a publisher a ‘coupon code’ for their readers to use that helps to track conversions.
For example:  when I recently released my 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook I also give people an opportunity to promote the workbook with an affiliate program whereby they could earn a 40% commission for each sale. When you sign up to become an affiliate you are given a special code unique to you that enables you to promote the workbook and make $7.98 per sale. The top affiliates earned over $2000 in the first few weeks after launch through these commissions.
  • Advertisers often prefer affiliate marketing as a way to promote their products because they know they’ll only need to pay for the advertising when there’s a conversion. I knew when I started this affiliate program that while I’d earn less for each sale that having a network of affiliates promoting it would almost certainly increase overall sales levels.
  • Publishers often prefer affiliate marketing because if they find a product that is relevant to their niche that earnings can go well in excess of any cost per click or cost per impression advertising campaign.

Why Affiliate Marketing Can Work Well on Blogs

Affiliate marketing isn’t the only way to make money from blogs and it won’t suit every blog/blogger (more on this below) but there are a few reasons why it can be profitable in our medium. Perhaps the biggest of these reasons is that affiliate marketing seems to work best when there’s a relationship with trust between the publisher and their readership.
I’ve found that as this trust deepens that readers are more likely to follow the recommendations that a blogger makes.
Of course this can also be a negative with affiliate marketing – promote the wrong product and trust can be broken (more on this below).

Affiliate Marketing – Easy Money?

While affiliate marketing can be incredibly lucrative it is important to know that affiliate marketing is not easy money. Most people who try it make very little as it relies upon numerous factors including:
  • traffic (high traffic helps a lot)
  • finding relevant products
  • finding quality products
  • building trust with your readers
  • having a readership who is in a ‘buying mood’
  • you being able to write good sales copy (and more)
There’s also some risk associated with affiliate marketing in that if you push too hard or promote products of a low quality you can actually burn readers and hurt your reputation and brand.
It’s also worth noting that affiliate marketing doesn’t work on all blogs. Some blogs are on topics where it is hard to find products to promote – other blogs attract audiences who are not in a buying frame of mind and for other blogs it just doesn’t fit with the blogger’s style or approach.
Tomorrow I want to continue the focus upon affiliate marketing with another post – this one on how to find affiliate products to promote.

Affiliate marketing is a great place to generate income without having your own product and make money selling products for 50 -75% commissions. Promoting Affiliate Landing Page will not make you money. You need to create your own Affiliate blog site.

Steps

  1. 1
    In order to generate income from Affiliate Marketing, first and foremost you need a website or blog site to post quality review about product you are promoting and have your website ranked high up in Google search page.
  2. 2
    Find a product to promote in your niche by going to ClickBank (CB Engine), Commission Junction, Linkshare and PayDotCom.com. You can also search for a product you like on the internet and go directly to their website and find “affiliate” and you can become their direct affiliate. Search for product with higher gravity, good pay out on each sell, return rate, and future sales commission. Be sure to check for higher gravity, good pay out on each sell, return rate, and future sales commission to consider. Get your hoplink.
  3. 3
    Get a Domain for the blog site to promote the affiliate product with quality review content in the blog. Be reminded writing an article or story if you are not an expert on the subject should be avoided. . If you are interested in a particular affiliate product to promote, then buy it and use it so you can write a honest fact based review about the product, and there is no doubt your review will be much more appealing to your target buyers.
  4. 4
    Domain name should be associated with a root keyword for the product you are promoting as much as possible. Unique branding of the product with combination of product name and related keyword will work for SEO.
  5. 5
    Hosting Service. If you do not already have a Hosting Service, HostGator and BlueHost are recommended for using WordPress Template to build website. These Hosting Services supports WordPress and its installation is available within their CPanel. Each time you create a blog site, you install WordPress for that blog. All the themes and plug-in available for WordPress can be uploaded from your WordPress Blog and it will not require you to use FTP.
  6. 6
    Creating the site itself is very easy from the WordPress Dashboard.Log into your WordPress blog and upload WordPress plugins and themes from your desktop. In your Dashboard go-to Settings at the bottom to give your title for the blog and description for your blog on Tagline.
  7. 7
    Go-to Plugins to activate the plugins installed. If you don’t see them there, just do the installs.

  1. 8
    Go-to Appearance to install Themes if you want to use different themes.
  2. 9
    Go-to Post to start your blog.
  3. 10
    Go-to Pages to add About me, Contact, and Privacy pages.
  4. 11
    Go-to Media to upload photos you want to use.
  5. 12
    Go-to Appearance – Widgets to add pages in the Sidebar.
  6. 13
    Save each time you edit
  7. 14
    This is the most important part of the work for your affiliate website involving your article and keywords search.
  8. 15
    You must take time on this one, because this is the foundation of your site before you build on it. This will make the difference between fortune and failure. Think about your angle of attack and draft your article to be posted in your website. Keep writing the article without any concern for keywords at this point to the size of over 1,000 words.
  9. 16
    After done writing your article, you are going to separate them into three posts and give subtitle for each post. Each post title should include keyword. Review your post draft and find keywords or LSI keywords within your post. This is where your keyword search begins… Witihn your draft posts you should be able to find some related keywords you are going to search… Your will edit your article and finalize your posts after keyword search is complete.
  10. 17
    Conducting comprehensive search on Keyword with Google Keyword Tools to come up with the Root Keyword (search should not consist of more than two words) and several LSI keywords to use. This is the important step for Search Engine Optimization.
  11. 18
    Find Less competing long tail key words to consist of 3 or 4 words.
  12. 19
    Must be related to buying or targeting a market that needs (problems) are closely related to what the product offers.


  13. Tips for Affiliate Marketing on Blogs


    1. Consider your Audience – start with your reader when considering what to promote. Relevancy is key.
    2. Genuine Recommendations and personal endorsements always work best – recommendations of things you personally genuinely like are always best.
    3. Link to Quality Products – the better the products that you recommend the more your readers will thank you for suggesting it.
    4. Contextual Deep Links work Best – in general you’ll have more luck promoting a product from within a post than on a sidebar
    5. Consider positioning of links – links/banners that are in parts of your post/blog that where readers look work best (top of posts for example)
    6. Traffic levels are Important – the more eyeballs your promotion gets the better
    7. Diversify without Clutter – some products work better for some audiences than others – so promoting a variety of products can be good – promoting too many is of course not good.
    8. Be Transparent – don’t try to trick people into clicking your links. I’ve changed my stance slightly on this – I used to put (aff) next to any affiliate link but in the end found readers were just annoyed by it or didn’t understand what it meant. Now I use site-wide disclaimers to talk about it.
    9. Combine with other Revenue Streams – every blog is different, some will work better than others with affiliate marketing while others will work better with adveritising. However I find on many blogs advertising and affiliate marketing can work well in tandem.
    10. Track results – if you don’t have some way of working out how your promotions are converting you could be wasting your time.
    11. Build Your Network Before You Need It

      Perhaps the biggest thing that I’ve learned about affiliate marketing is that it works best the bigger and stronger your network is. I mentioned in my first list that ‘traffic levels are important’ – this is true, but connected to it is your ‘network’.

      Whether it be loyal blog readers and subscribers, your email list, your Twitter connections, your Facebook friends or some other social network – the better your network the better you’ll do at driving affiliate sales.
      It’s not just about size – the size of your network is only part of what I’m talking about here. Also important is the depth of relationship that you have with your network/readers and the amount of trust that they have in you. If you have consistently helped people and been useful to them over a long time they’re probably more likely to respond to your recommendations.
      Relevancy/Focus counts – The other key part of your network is how relevant it is and how focused it is upon the topic that you’re doing promotions on. For example – I see some people on Twitter running competitions to build their follower numbers in a way that just brings in any follower that they can. The problem with this is that they end up with a large but unfocused network. I personally would rather have a smaller network who all shared the one interest than a large one who just signed up to get a prize.
      Lastly, a network takes time to build – if you think you’ll be doing some affiliate marketing at some point in the future – start building your network now, before you need it. This gives you time to build the depth of relationships, trust and focus of your network before you begin promoting affiliate products.

      12. Try different Mediums

      I’ve alluded to this above already but one of the things that I’ve noticed over the last few years is promotions work differently on different mediums.
      For example: some affiliate promotions seem to convert best in a blog post, others work best when you send an email to a list you’ve been building while others seem to take off on Twitter or other social media sites.
      The key is to try different approaches, to have build up your network before you need it (see above) and to track the results for each promotion so you can check what is and isn’t converting.

      13. Multiple Promotions of the same Product

      I spoke about this at Blog World Expo last year in a session but don’t think I’ve written about it here at ProBlogger. Here’s what I’ve found:
      If you write a single blog post promoting an affiliate product you’ll have a certain percentage of readers buy the product (the % varies a lot). If you are able to follow that up with a different type of post a few days later it can reinforce the promotion.
      Here’s how I’ve done it on my photography blog:
      1. Blog Post 1 – a post announcing a new product, giving some benefits, sharing who the product is relevant for etc.
      2. Blog Post 2 – a post a few days later that is an interview with the person behind the product – exploring why they made it, expanding upon what it includes, who it’s for and giving the product context. I’d try to also include some tips or suggestions for readers who don’t buy the product in such an interview so it is a useful post for everyone.
      3. Email List – later in the week email out the subscriber list linking to the previous posts and reinforcing the promotion.
      4. Tweets/Followups – I would also include a few Tweets about the promotion through the week and would consider a 3rd blog post a week later – perhaps some reader reviews of the product.
      The key is to not spam your network but to find interesting and useful ways to draw attention to the product multiple times over a week or two so as to reinforce it and give those who take a little longer to make a decision the opportunity to get the product.

      14. Bonuses Work

      There are many techniques that internet marketers use to increase sales of their products. I find some a little ‘cheap’ and ‘nasty’ but many do work. Two that I’ve found less offensive and/or manipulative are where you add value to the affiliate promotion by either adding a bonus of your own to the offer and/or getting the person behind the product to offer a bonus or discount just for your readers.
      I’ve done this a number of times on my blogs and have found that conversions are significantly higher.

      15. It takes Time

      A theme that regular readers of ProBlogger will recognize is that making money from blogs (through any method) takes time. While an affiliate program does have the potential to make you a lot of money very quickly – it almost always comes after a lot of work and once you’ve spent a lot of time and effort building out your network.
      The early days of building your network may see very little (if any) results. I personally earned very little from affiliate marketing in my first year or two of blogging but as I mentioned above in the last year or two it’s really begun to exponentially increase – partly as a result of getting smarter with my promotions but partly just as my network grew in size and quality.

      16. Timing is Important

      One of the things I’ve learned over the last week of launching my own product is just how much difference there can be in the rate of sales at different times of the day and week. It would vary depending upon the location of most of a blog’s readers but for me sales have been significantly up during business hours in the USA and on weekdays. No real surprises there.
      The lesson translates to promoting products – unless the product has a real focus upon the type of people surfing the web on the weekends or late at night you’ll want to time your promotions to those times of the weeks that your audience is online. Similarly – avoid public holidays – this last week even though we launched the workbook 3 days after Memorial Day in the US I suspect we lost a few sales as some people took the week off.

      What Would You Add?

      I know that many readers of ProBlogger have experimented a lot with affiliate marketing. What advice would you add? What techniques have you used (or seen used) that work?

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