Archive for the ‘Affiliate Tips’ Category

Written by: Guest author, Simon Slade

Those of us who have been involved in the affiliate marketing world for a while are all too aware that it is an industry prone to change, and lots of it. A website that makes you money one day, might literally disappear from the search engine rankings overnight, and leave you struggling to find a reason why. The terms of service (TOS) on one of your favorite Web 2.0 sites might change in the blink of an eye, and you suddenly find yourself losing an important traffic or income source. Wouldn’t it be nice just to have some reliable marketing constants for once? Well today, you are going to learn about the three constants in affiliate marketing; these are the things that won’t change any time soon, and they should form the foundations of your affiliate marketing efforts.

1. Content is King

You’ve probably heard this term referred to many times before, without actually paying too much mind to it. However, one of the constants of affiliate marketing is that search engines and readers alike reward quality content. Not only are you going to rank higher in the search engines by creating original, well-researched content that provides value to readers, but you will also build trust. This trust factor will help you to achieve better conversion rates and more sales, since people are far more likely to buy from someone they trust.

Creating quality content IS actually an exact science, and there really isn’t much guesswork involved at all:

• Find a problem that people in your niche have
• Research a number of different ways to solve the problem
• Write it out in a clear and logical fashion
• Make sure your content contains good grammar and spelling
• Teach what the headline of your article/content piece promises to teach (this is by far the biggest secret to creating quality content)

Many websites provide free and informative lessons on creating quality content.

2. Keyword Research

I used to have a high school history teacher who swore by what he called the “5 Ps” system – “Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.” Not only was this great advice for passing exams, but it relates directly to affiliate marketing as well. Proper keyword research is going to help you prevent poor performance (i.e. not making any sales).

For as long as people have been searching for information online through search engines, keywords have been relevant. According to Wikipedia, Google receives several hundred million searches per day, and with more people coming online every day, this number is only going to increase. It seems unlikely that search engines are ever going to disappear as one of the cornerstones of the Internet!

Keywords are at the very heart of search engine queries, so it makes sense that keyword research – getting to the bottom of what people are actually looking for – is a constant in affiliate marketing.

Look out for keywords based around the following:

• Urgency (‘fix bad credit score quickly’)
• Crisis/desperation (‘how to get ex back’)
• Product name + review (‘The Truth About Abs review’)
• How to/learn (‘how to fix a broken Xbox 360’/ ‘learn to fix a broken Xbox 360’)
• Product type (‘dog training DVDs/eBooks/guides’)

To find keywords you could try the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, or get a free copy of Traffic Travis (a little bit of self-promotion there!).

3. Proven Affiliate Products

The final constant in affiliate marketing is making sure you promote proven products. There is always a massive temptation to jump on board and promote the latest products from the Clickbank Marketplace that promise huge commissions and launches, and then fade to nothingness after a while (leaving you stuck promoting a product that isn’t really going anywhere).

As an affiliate, you want to avoid promoting “fly by night” products if you plan to build a reliable income stream that has good growth potential. Instead, focus most of your energy on promoting products that have been around for a while and have a proven track record.

Our SaleHoo affiliate program, for example, has been running since 2005, and provides plenty of resources for affiliates, with new ones added regularly. Look out for affiliate programs of this nature, which provide consistent support and potential on a going forward basis. Take your time when picking products; research here will save you potential headaches down the track.

Some things to look out for are:

• How long has the product and affiliate program been around
• Does it offer free resources to help you, the affiliate, do your job properly
• How easy is it to get in touch with the product owner/affiliate manager
• Are customer reviews of the product largely positive (look for unbiased reviews in forums or blogs)
• Is the product high quality (consider asking for a review copy first)

In conclusion, you can see that there are some constants in affiliate marketing – a world that usually evolves at such a rapid rate it can even give experienced marketers a headache. Quality content, solid keyword research, and promoting proven affiliate products; these are the three “bedrock” constants in affiliate marketing that are unlikely to change any time soon.

About the Author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

 

 

Written By: Justin Clark, AdChop.com

Would you like a simple technique to get better results as an online marketer? Outsource. If “outsourcing” sounds daunting, don’t worry – it can be simple and surprisingly inexpensive.

If you’ve been generating revenue online for a while, this likely isn’t the first time you’ve heard that outsourcing can make your life easier and help you to boost your profits.  Rather than simply rehash what you may have heard before, I’m also going to try to give you a few specific tips that will help you outsource more effectively, whether or not you have any experience.

In A Nutshell:

First, a quick intro for the brand-newbies:  Do you have work to do that you don’t like doing, or that you don’t know how to do? You can probably solve that problem by outsourcing the work inexpensively through any one of a variety of outsourcing websites. The process generally goes something like this:

• You post a description of the work you need done on an outsourcing website (could be for a 5-minute task, a full-time job, or anything in between)
• Contractors from around the world apply to your job posting, and tell you how much money they’re willing to work for (if you live in a developed country, you’ll probably get bids from contractors in developing countries who are happy to work for far less than you’d have to pay someone from your own city)
• After a bit of interviewing and testing, you hire someone, manage them as they work, and spend most of your time on other more productive/enjoyable tasks than the one you’ve outsourced.
• When the job is done, or at certain milestones, you pay your contractor by sending a payment through the secure outsourcing site where you hired him or her.

Where To Outsource:

A few of the most popular outsourcing sites include: Elance.com, Scriptlance.com, VWorker.com, Freelancer.com, Guru.com, and oDesk.com.

They all have advantages & disadvantages, but my personal favorite is oDesk because of their time tracking feature (they record the screens of your contractors as they work) and their hiring process (they have detailed contractor profiles, and also publish the results of tests that contractor’s can take to demonstrate their skill level in various areas.)

What To Outsource

If you think you can’t afford it or that you have nothing to outsource, think again! Here are just a few of the tasks that I’ve outsourced, many for less than $2/hour:

• Designing mock-ups for a website
• Link-building for SEO
• Designing banner ads (728×90, 300×250, etc)
• Writing high quality articles
• Creating a custom WordPress plugin
• Building entire WordPress sites from scratch
• Building a custom PHP website
• Creating custom software to mass-analyze potential domain purchases
• Finding/creating 100s of images for split-testing in Facebook advertising
• On-page SEO
• Flash animation
• Analyzing various WordPress themes, and then advising me on which is best for my project
• Much more!

I’ve even hired people to teach me how to do things online – those job descriptions sounded something like: “I don’t know how to do XYZ with WordPress. I need someone to do XYZ to my website, and then teach me how you did it so that I can do it myself in the future.” Just think: Instead of spending 10 hours pulling your hair out trying to figure out the inner workings of WordPress (for example), you can hire someone for say $2 per hour who already knows how to do the job… and within 2 hours he/she will have the work done and will also have sent you a detailed explanation of how to do it yourself. Pretty sweet!

And I’ve even hired contractors for non-business tasks such as touching up an old black & white photo of my parents! If your own time is worth $20 per hour, it’s pointless to do any task that someone else will do for $1 per hour.

Tools

A couple of tools that come in quite handy when outsourcing are:

Skype – Faster communication than email! Great for interviewing job candidates as well as communicating with existing contractors. Skype also has a screen-sharing feature.

Jing - Free, super simple, and easy to use software that lets you create up to 5 minute screen capture videos. Great for giving instructions to contractors when you want to show them how to do something. A video is worth a thousand words

Time Doctor – If you’re using an outsourcing website that doesn’t have built-in time tracking to record your contractors’ screens so you can see what they’re doing, you might want to consider using a third party time tracking service like Time Doctor.

A Few Tips

Before you get started, here are a few outsourcing tips based on my own experience (some of these are specific to oDesk):

• When searching for contractors or posting a job, I recommend specifying that you prefer contractors from the Philippines because that’s where I’ve found my best contractors (on oDesk you can’t target “Philippines” specifically, but you can specify the more general “East Asia”). I’ve also had good luck with contractors in Bangladesh and Russia, although they can be a bit more expensive.
• Specify the upper limit for what you’re willing to pay (usually I set it to $3/hour, and often mention an even lower limit in the written description) – otherwise you’ll get people bidding too high which will raise the “average bid” and may encourage additional high bids. If you do get a bid that is too high, reject that contractor quickly so they no longer appear on the list for other contractors to see.
• Before hiring someone for a big job, hire a few people for a very small job first to test them out (oDesk makes this very easy to do). Hiring multiple contractors has the additional benefit of generating extra (hopefully positive) reviews for your profile!
• When you’re new to oDesk, don’t be afraid to “invite” many contractors to apply to your job instead of simply posting a job and waiting for applications. You can generate a lot more interest in your job that way.
• When a job is finished and your contractor did a good job, tell your contractor that you’re giving him/her a 5-star review (this will look good on their profile), AND ask them to also rate you 5-stars if they were happy working for you (this will look good on YOUR profile and will make it even easier to hire high quality contractors next time). Don’t be afraid to specifically ask them for “5 stars”.
• On oDesk, avoid hiring people if you’re going to pay them less than $1 for the entire job. If you hire someone for a job and pay them less than $1 in total, your oDesk profile will indicate that you didn’t hire anyone at all. So if you hire 20 people for a simple task and pay them each $0.50, your oDesk profile will indicate that you posted 20 jobs and didn’t hire anyone for the positions (even though you did). Potential contractors aren’t as likely to apply for jobs posted by employers who appear to hire no one for many of their jobs. If you need to hire a large number of people to each perform the same a simple task (like completing a 3 question survey), it’s best to use a crowdsourcing site like MTurk.com.

Still on the fence about outsourcing? Just do it! A small outsourcing test will barely make a dent in your wallet and will open your eyes to a world of possibilities. It costs nothing to post a job on most outsourcing sites, so get started today. As Timothy Ferris says: “It’s time to learn how to be the boss. It isn’t time consuming. It’s low-cost and low-risk. Whether or not you “need” someone at this point is immaterial. It is an exercise… It is important to take baby steps towards paying others to do work for you. Few do it, which is another reason so few people have their ideal lifestyles.”

What can YOU outsource to simplify your life and free your time so you can make more money?

About The Author

Justin Clark is an affiliate marketer who runs AdChop.com, a growing collection of internet marketing case studies. He outsourced much of the design & development of AdChop on oDesk.

 

Written by: Miles Baker, ClickScoop

ClickBank has several powerful features that affiliates and vendors can take advantage of in order to increase their profits. Recently, ClickBank has upgraded and added many new features that have a proven capacity to increase your sales. Below you will find 5 of these ClickBank features that are my favorites. Some of these features are new, and some have been around awhile, though all of them have the potential to rock your profits!

Feature #1: TID & VTID Tracking

Who TID & VTID Tracking is for: Affiliates and Vendors

How TID & VTID Tracking Works:

A TID is a ClickBank tracking I.D. It’s a string of letters and/or numbers up to 24 characters in length appended to the end of a ClickBank HopLink. Using a TID allows you to track your hoplinks based on the TID associated with it. There is no limit to the amount of TIDs you can use. ClickBank TID’s are also available for Vendors to use as well, the difference is the variable “VTID” instead of “TID” and that the Vendor TID is appended to the paylink instead of the HopLink.

How TIDs Make You More Money:

Using TID’s provides you with the information you need in order to determine where you should be focusing your efforts.

Tracking your sales with TID’s allows you to pinpoint exactly where sales are coming from. For example, if you want to track links from Twitter you could append the TID of “twitter” to your HopLink. Inside your ClickBank reporting you will see all the statistics associated with that TID for clicks, sales, refunds, etc.

One of my favorite uses is to use TID’s to track what specific pages on a website the sales are coming from. This allows me to focus my efforts on my most profitable pages in order to get higher rankings in the search engines.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/affiliate-help/affiliate-basics/all-about-hoplinks/#TID
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-basics/creating-a-payment-link/

Feature #2: PitchPlus (formerly known as One-Click Upsell)

Who PitchPlus is for: Vendors (but affiliates can benefit too!)

How PitchPlus Works:

PitchPlus allows vendors to add additional products to sell to their customers after the initial purchase.  Once a customer enters their payment information and confirms their purchase they are presented with an upsell page.  With a single click the customer can purchase the additional product without entering their credit card details again.

As a vendor you create the products to sell as your upsells. The PitchPlus Advanced feature offers the ability to present up to three consecutive upsell offers as well as downsells. In a downsell scenario, if a customer decides to decline the upsell offer they could be presented with another product or the same product at a lower price.

How PitchPlus Makes You More Money:

Adding upsells to your products increases your overall earnings per customer for both vendors and affiliates. Since the customer is not required to re-enter their credit card information, the one-click upsell can convert extremely well assuming you have related and appealing offers.

Personally I’ve found PitchPlus to be one of the easiest and most effective ways at increasing income as a vendor.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/one-click-upsell/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/pitchplus/

Feature #3: Joint Venture

Who Joint Venture is for: Vendors & Affiliates

How Joint Venture Works:

ClickBank Joint Venture is a newer and extremely versatile feature.  This allows vendors to split their earnings with partners, promote other vendor products as upsells, and even allow vendors to offer 2^nd tier affiliate commissions.

The Joint Venture feature also works for affiliates.  Affiliates can partner together and split profits from their affiliate sales.

The Joint Venture feature allows you to set up contracts within your ClickBank account.  In the contract you can specify a range of details such as how commissions are divided, start and end dates for the contract, and much more.

How Joint Venture Makes You More Money:

Partnerships are extremely profitable because you leverage one anothers’ strengths. The Joint Venture feature makes collaborating and partnering with people much easier. With the Joint Venture feature the trust factor is increased because one partner is not relying on the other partner to pay them; ClickBank is dividing up and making the payments. Additionally Joint Venture is accurate, easy, and hassle free to split up payments between partners.

There’s really an unlimited variety of ways you could use this feature. Here are just a few short examples to give you some ideas…

• You could have someone write product reviews for your blog and in exchange you could give them a portion of the sales that those reviews generate.
• You could partner with someone to create a new product and split the profits.
• If you’re a vendor you could find another vendor and cross promote one another’s products as one-click upsells.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/account-help/account-tools/joint-venture/

Feature #4: Recurring Billing

Who Recurring Billing is for: Vendors (but affiliates can benefit too!)

How Recurring Billing Works:

ClickBank Recurring Billing gives vendors the ability to sell their product at an initial price, and then setup a rebill price for each subsequent payment for the duration of a rebill product. In addition, this gives vendors the ability to offer a trial period for the product as well.

How Recurring Billing Makes You More Money:

Creating Recurring Billing Products gives vendors a continuous revenue stream over time. With regular payment schedules, such as bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual, vendors can earn more per sale on average than with a standard product.

The recurring billing feature can also be used in combination with PitchPlus Advanced.  This combination can be extremely powerful in generating additional income that is also residual.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-guides/creating-a-recurring-billing-product/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/affiliate-help/affiliate-basics/promoting-recurring-billing-products/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-guides/recurring-billing-subscription-and-membership-products/

Feature #5: Marketplace Search

Who Marketplace Search is for: Affiliates

How Marketplace Search Works:

The Marketplace search capabilities were recently enhanced and now allow users to search by a variety of product and vendor criteria.  You’ll find Marketplace filters and attributes to search by on the left hand side of the ClickBank Marketplace. Additionally you can use the ‘advanced search’ link next to the search box for additional search features.

How Marketplace Search Makes You More Money:

Finding the right ClickBank products to promote will help you make more sales and increase profits. Using the Marketplace Search you will be able to find which vendors are offering higher payouts, use PitchPlus, offer rebills, offer affiliate tools, and much more. You can even find out which vendors offer $1 trials. Using this information allows you to find and promote the products that are the best match for your marketing efforts as well as find vendors who will make you the most money overall.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
http://www.clickbank.com/advancedMarketplaceSearch.htm
http://www.clickbank.com/blog/2011/12/08/new-and-improved-marketplace-search-capabilities/

About the Author

Miles Baker has been marketing online since 1997 and has been a ClickBank client for over 12 years. He currently resides in Fort Collins, CO where he runs ClickScoop.com, a community for ClickBank Vendors and Affiliates.

 

Written by: Guest Author, Mike Capuzzi

A smart way to add bottom-line sales and more unique and credibility-boosting value to your online business is to start using webinars. Webinars have been around for years and if you’re not familiar with them they’re a great way to host virtual meetings and presentations without ever having to leaving your office. Webinars are also super-convenient for your attendees as they too don’t have to leave their office or home and can simply watch and listen on the computer, iPad, or even smart phone!

In case you’re new to webinars, a webinar is typically a live video and audio presentation where attendees can see your computer screen and hear you talk as you navigate through a presentation, “how to” demonstration or anything else you’re showing on your computer. They also provide a rich participation environment and give you the flexibility to provide:

• Handouts before or after the webinar
• The ability for attendees to ask questions during the presentation
• Live chat with the organizer or other participants
• Live attendee polls for getting instant feedback
• Automatic follow-up marketing to attendees and even non-attendees

The other good news is if you can use a computer – you can host webinars – and I cannot think of a single type of online business owner who could not figure out how to host either live or recorded webinars and help strengthen their relationship with their customers, clients and prospects either in a small, 1:1 webinar or a large-scale group webinar.

Today’s webinar technology allows you to host LIVE webinars or RECORDED webinars that can be played on-demand or on some type of pre-determined schedule. And before you think you cannot use webinars in your business or think they are too complicated, I want you to know neither of these thoughts is correct and to prove my point, I’m going to describe four ways, four different types of online business owners can use webinars to generate or reinforce their business relationships and create more sales. Think about your own business and how you might be able to use webinars as you read through these scenarios.

Scenario #1:  Diet & Health Author – Selling Digital Cookbooks Online

An ebook author could use webinars in several different ways to promote her ebooks. She could host virtual cooking classes for a fee where they show attendees how to make healthy meals. In this scenario, they could show videos or photos of how the food is prepared. She could allow real-time interaction and questions and answers from her paid attendees.

Scenario #2:  SEO Expert – Lead Generation and Training Course

An SEO expert could use webinars in several different ways. He could host free, live lead generation webinars to show people how to do keyword research and then offer the opportunity to work with him as a consultant. He could also develop a 10-part course, with each part consisting of a webinar session showing a specific SEO topic. He could sell seats to the live webinars, record them and then use them in a webinar replay system that offers the 10 webinars over the course of 10 weeks in order to get additional sales.

Scenario #3: Internet/Affiliate Marketer – Promoting & Selling Products

An Internet/Affiliate Marketer could easily add webinars to drive new sales to large groups of attendees. Imagine a weekly webinar where she hosts affiliate partners on a content-rich webinar and then offers their product at the end of the webinar. Software demos and Power Point presentations work great as webinar content and are easily created.

Scenario #4: Information Marketer – Product Creation

Webinars provide a great way to create content that could be used to create print or electronic products that can be sold. An info-marketer could host a number of paid or free webinars and on each he is interviewing a guest expert on a specific topic. These webinars could be recorded and turned into videos, DVDs, books and courses.

So there you have a few different webinar ideas for different types of online business owners. There are many others out there and the use of webinars in your business is only limited by your creativity and imagination.

About the Author

To help business owners get started using webinars, Mike Capuzzi created a simple and easy-to-grasp product called How to Boost Your Business with P.E.R.F.E.C.T. Webinars! He’s been using webinars since 2004 and How to Boost Your Business with P.E.R.F.E.C.T. Webinars contains strategies, tools and techniques to create hugely profitable webinars, including his proven 7 step strategy to Plan & Promote, Engage, Record, Follow-up, Edit, Convert, and Turn a webinar into a cash machine for your business! Check it out on ClickBank and www.theperfectwebinar.com and start creating webinars in your business!

 

 

 

Written and recorded by: Guest author, Steven Clayton

About the Author

Steven Clayton is the co-founder of Blueprint Information Products, LLC and has been making a living online for the past 8 years.  Check out the “Success Stories” in his forum for an idea of what he’s talking about in this video. Also, Steve’s company is running an awesome contest right now where you can get their premier research tool free AND have a chance at winning a LARGE cash prize. Check that out right here.

With thousands of products currently in the ClickBank Marketplace and new products being added daily, finding just the right product to promote can be challenging. If this applies to you, then you’re in luck. The ClickBank Marketplace just got better! For your convenience, we have added advanced search options to the Marketplace page, making it easier than ever for you to find the perfect product to promote.

In addition to new product search filters, you can also select product attributes based on your requirements such as language, billing type, upsell and more, simply by checking a box. Click on the video below to see a demonstration of the new and improved Marketplace search capabilities.

Visit the ClickBank Marketplace now to start searching for your next profitable product to promote.

Written by: Guest Author, Danny Iny

Affiliate marketing is the ultimate level playing field.

Anyone can get started, and if they’re smart and hard-working, they can be making money in a matter of days.

All you’ve got to do is find a good offer, run some good ads, and watch the traffic convert into sales.

Right?

Well, maybe that used to be true, but it’s not anymore…

The Low Hanging Fruit Is Gone

It was definitely true in the early days of affiliate marketing, for several reasons; first of all, there was a lot less for sale in the online world, which meant that any affiliate marketer had a much larger share of voice just by virtue of being there.

The regulatory environment was also a lot more lenient, which means that it affiliate marketers had a lot more room to maneuver in selling their offers (it’s good that this has changed, otherwise the whole industry would have been in trouble!).

Most importantly, though, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to advertising opportunities; keywords and phrases that had a lot of buying intent behind them, but that weren’t very competitive yet, and could be had for mere pennies per click.

And yes – when you can buy high-converting keywords for cheap, it’s hard not to make money.

But times have changed, and you can’t do that nearly as easily as you once could; most of the low hanging fruit has already been pulled off of the online tree, and the affiliate marketing game of finding the next hot opportunity has changed into a different game altogether…

It’s an Optimization Game

Now the game is about optimization – finding an offer that converts, and then optimizing every factor that you can control until you max out your deal value. Here are some of the factors that smart affiliate marketers will do split-testing on:

• Lead Sources – This is where the leads are coming from in the first place; you’ll find that your Google AdWords traffic converts differently from your SEO traffic, which converts differently from your Facebook ad traffic, and so forth. Not only that, but your cost per lead for each of those lead sources will be different. With enough testing, you can find the lowest cost per conversion.
• Ad Copy – The actual text of your ads will change both the cost of running the ad, the click-through rates on the ad, and the likelihood of the clicking-through traffic to actually buy whatever product you’re promoting.
• Landing Pages – The landing page is where the most testing is traditionally done. You can test everything, from your headline, to the page format, to the colors, to the trust seals, to your affiliate disclaimers, to when the buy buttons are presented on the screen – they can all make a difference to your conversion rate, and to your bottom line.
• Affiliate Offers – Finally, you can try swapping out the actual offer for something different. Maybe your leads are more interested in one brand of affiliate product than another, and maybe the second brand – even though the deal value is lower – will end up delivering more profits by virtue of a higher conversion rate.

When you’ve maximized your conversion rates and deal value, and minimized your cost per sale, you’ve got a smoothly humming affiliate marketing machine. And yes, doing that does take time, money, patience and skill – but once you’ve got it, boy is it a sweet deal!

That is, until Google stops liking you…

Until Google Stops Liking You

The trouble is that most of the major lead sources that most affiliate marketers rely on are owned by bodies like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.

What does that mean for you?

You can work your way to the top of the affiliate marketing world through diligent split-testing, until you’ve got sales streaming through your marketing system at bullet-speed… until someone’s algorithm changes, and their engine stops liking you.

Then your affiliate business is dead in the water, and you’ve got to start from scratch if you’re lucky, and work your way off of Google’s blacklist if you aren’t.

So what’s an affiliate marketer to do?

The answer lies in the old adage that “the money is in the list,” but with a twist…

The Real Money is in the ENGAGED List

If you have a list of eager buyers, then you don’t have to worry about Google messing with your traffic sources – whatever happens, your followers will continue to follow, as long as you maintain the relationship, and keep on living up to your end of the bargain.

With a list of eager buyers, you don’t have to keep working off of one-off traffic, because you can sell more than one thing to the same person – and research shows that someone who has already bought something is eight times as likely to buy from you again!

You probably agree that a list of eager buyers is a good thing to have… but where can you get such a list?

The answer is that you’ve got to build that list yourself – and for that list to be as eager to buy as you want them to be, they need to be engaged. In other words, you need more than a list – you need an engaged community.

You need an audience.

How to Build an Engaged Audience, from Scratch

Building an engaged audience from scratch is part science, and part art. You don’t have to learn it all through trial and error, because others have already done that, and you can learn from their mistakes, and from their successes.

To get you started, here are three things that you can do to convert your one-off affiliate traffic into a loyal list that will stick with you for the long-haul:

1. Start blogging and showing your true nature. The days of the anonymous affiliate marketer hiding behind a copied landing page are over; too many people have been burned by false claims, and for your prospects to trust your recommendation, they will have to know who you are. So tell them – start blogging, and give them a reason to keep coming back, so that even if they aren’t ready to buy now, they can start following you, and buy from you in the future.
2. Create a value-adding auto-responder sequence. People are justifiably careful about who they let into their inbox – so don’t just offer some PLR e-book and start marketing to them non-stop. Instead, give them something that they will get real value out of, and that will demonstrate to them just how trustworthy and credible you are (like we do with our free video course about how to Get More Cash Out of Any Business, Website or Blog).
3. Offer an incentive to buy through your link. Instead of just recommending your affiliate offer, why not give people an incentive to buy through your link? This is great for improving conversions, but the best part is that it gives you a good reason to keep on interacting with your prospects after they have made the purchase – which means that you retain control of the customer relationship, and you will have the opportunity to sell to them again in the future.

Of course, this is just the start, but if you start with this, you’re already three steps ahead of most affiliate marketers, and that much closer to the pot of gold at the finish line.

And if you need a little more help…

Yours Free: Engagement from Scratch!

All of these ideas are expanded with pages upon pages of details and ideas, which I compiled into my new book called Engagement from Scratch! How Super-Community Builders Create a Loyal Audience and How You Can Do the Same!

Today, the book is launching, and I’m very excited to be able to share it with you – for free!

Yep, that’s right – the book is free. You can download the entire book without paying a cent. Just visit the book’s website, click on the download link, and tell me what email address to send it to, and moments later you’ll the full-length PDF waiting for you in your inbox.

Prefer a hard copy? Spend a few extra bucks and get the paperback version so that you can read on the couch or in bed, and write notes in the margins.

About the Author

Danny Iny (@DannyIny) is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, expert marketer, and the Freddy Krueger of Blogging. Together with Guy Kawasaki, Brian Clark and Mitch Joel, he wrote the book on how to build an engaged audience from scratch.

 

Written by: Guest Author, Danny Iny

Are you an affiliate marketer? Do you want to make more money?

Yes and yes, right?

You’ve probably tried every trick in the book, right?

Google image ads, Twitter traffic, cheap Facebook ads… every possible way of getting cheap clicks to your landing page has probably caught your eye at some point or another.

Most of these tricks don’t really work, and if they do, it isn’t for long.

The real secret to making big money as an affiliate is split-testing.

And as an affiliate marketer, it’s actually easier for you than it is for a lot of other people…

Affiliate Marketers Have So Much Less to Worry About!

Affiliate marketers are already several steps ahead of the online marketing curve.

That’s because, as an affiliate marketer, you aren’t responsible for the entire chain of conversion.
All you have to do is find qualified leads, warm them up, and send them to the vendor’s landing page – the vendor will do the rest.

Not that all of that stuff is easy… that’s why some people are super-affiliates, and some people don’t make a dime.
But still, it’s the vendor who has to create an awesome product, and to tweak their landing page and funnel until it is a high-performing conversion machine. Which means that you don’t have to worry about turning prospects into customers, or keeping them as repeat customers – that’s the vendor’s job.

Which is why things are easier for affiliate marketers – they don’t have to split-test their product ideas, and they don’t have to optimize the back-end of the funnel.

But despite all that, in some ways, split testing is actually harder for affiliate marketers than it is for other people…

Affiliate Marketers Have Much Less Control

Split testing is harder for affiliate marketers because there’s less that you can split test; here’s a short list of the things that you don’t control:
• The product
• The checkout process
• The back-end funnel
• The messaging
• The imagery
• And the list goes on…

So in other words, if the offer isn’t fundamentally capable of selling itself, there isn’t all that much you can do about it.

Which is why affiliates look for tried and tested offers, with solid and proven EPC (earnings per click) rates. The trouble is that every other affiliate marketer is doing the exact same thing!

And if every other affiliate marketer is doing the exact same thing…

There’s Dramatically More Competition!

Yup, competition is a lot tougher for affiliate marketers.

Whereas people who sell their own stuff have to compete with other products and offers (which is hard enough!), affiliate marketers also have to compete with lots of other people who:
• Target the same lead sources,
• Run similar ads,
• Refer to the same swipe material, and
• Sell the exact same thing!

Yikes – what can you do to stand out?

That’s where split-testing comes in. In order to excel as an affiliate marketer, you need to constantly be split-testing the things that you do control, namely:
• Your lead sources
• Your ads
• Your landing pages
• Your incentives

Let’s go through these all one-by-one, and explore what to test, and how to do it. But first…

How do you do split testing, anyway?

Just to get us all on the same page, let’s quickly review.

Split testing (or A/B testing) is about testing two different variations of something, to see which does a better job of getting your audience to do what you want them to do. Common examples of things that you can split test include headline variations, button text and colors, and product pictures.

At a high level, that’s all there is to it.

Now, when it comes to running the actual tests, you need two things:
1. Some sort of technology to randomly serve the different variations to visitors.
2. Some way of analyzing the results to know when they’re statistically significant (in other words, to make sure that the results you’re seeing are caused by whatever you’re testing, rather than just being a random coincidence).

This may sound a bit complicated, but you really don’t need to worry about it; there are great tools that will do it all for you, like Google Website Optimizer (free), or Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer (paid, but are worth it).

And as for doing the analysis, there are lots of great free split test checkers out there that can do it for you.

Okay, are we up to speed?

Good – now let’s get into the meat of what you, as an affiliate marketer, can be testing…

Split Testing Your Lead Sources

The first thing that you can (and should) split test is your lead sources – in other words, where are you getting your traffic and prospects from.

Too many affiliates are one-trick ponies in this regard – they have their favorite traffic strategy (often the only one that they’ve been able to get decent results from), and they stick to it like glue.

Well, there are a lot of traffic sources out there, for example:
• Google AdWords
• MSN/Bing/Yahoo!
• Facebook
• Twitter lists
• CPV ad networks
• Email blasts to your list
• Email blasts to rented lists
• JVs with related products
• And the list goes on… and on… and on!

Different lead sources will work differently for different offers, so test them to see what works best. Also, when testing, make sure that you aren’t comparing absolute conversion numbers, but rather conversion relative to the cost of the traffic!

Split Testing Your Ads

The second thing that you should split test is the ad or call to action that you are presenting to your leads. Here are some things that you can test:
• The headline of the ad. Try featuring different pain points or benefits, to see what works best.
• The body of the ad. It may be short (like on AdWords) or longer, but either way, you’re communicating what you’re offering, and why it’s valuable. Change that up to see what makes a difference.
• The call to action. Experiment with more and less explicit calls to action (“click here” vs. “learn more”, for example), and experiment with a focus on action versus results (“buy now” vs. “get instant access”).
Just one thing – when you’re testing different ads, make sure you’re tracking the right thing, and that is sales (not click-throughs)!

It’s not hard to write an ad that will get lots of people to click, but what you want to do is write an ad that will get few people to click, many of whom will then buy. Consider adding barriers to interest (like a listed price) on the ad, to deter people who aren’t likely to make a purchase.

Split Testing Your Landing Pages

Yup, direct-linking to an affiliate offer is a sucker’s bet, because you’re giving up way too much control over the sales process.

Which is why your landing page is where most of your split testing is going to happen – and so it should be! Your landing page, realistically speaking, is what will make the most difference to your bottom line.

Here are some of the most important things that you should test on your landing page:
• Your headline. Yes, you’ve heard this before, but it’s true – the headline determines how many of the people visiting your page actually read the first paragraph, as opposed to clicking away. So test, and test, and test, until you get it right.
• Your page format. In other words, short vs. long copy, and text vs. video.
• Delayed button introduction. You’ve probably seen this – a button that only appears after a video has been running for a certain amount of time. Test it out – it might work for you.
• Your colors. Different colors prompt different behaviors (this is called color psychology), and you should test different combinations to see what works best for your offer and audience.
• Your button placements and text. This can make a huge difference on click-throughs and purchases, so test, test, and test!
• Your trust seals. These are the seals from Trust-E, Verisign, the Better Business Bureau, and other organizations, that let the reader know that they can trust you and the merchant that you are representing.
• Your affiliate disclaimer. This is one that many people overlook, but it can make a big difference. Sometimes you’ll get better results with the small print in the footer-style, but sometimes you’re better off working it into your text (“Hell yeah, I’m an affiliate – I’m proud to stand with this offer!”).

This can take a lot of time to do properly, but believe me, the results are worth it!

Split Testing Your Incentives

The last thing that you should be split testing is something that many affiliates overlook altogether, and that is your incentive offer.

An incentive is something that you offer so that people buy through your affiliate link, as opposed to going directly to the merchant, or going through somebody else’s link. This is particularly valuable during a launch, when your prospects are likely to be hearing about the offer from a lot of other people.

Here are some of the things that you could consider offering as an incentive to people who buy through your link:
• Free or discounted access to one of your products
• Some free consulting time with you
• Access to an exclusive webinar that you will put on
• A portion of your affiliate commission, thereby reducing the effective price of the offer
• There are many other ideas… use your imagination!

The importance of an incentive can’t be over-stated – especially in an affiliate-saturated market, it can make all the difference.

Now, after reading this post, you should be ready to go out and split test to your heart’s content. But before you do that, I have two warnings to leave you with…

Warning #1: Testing Shouldn’t Be Random…

Some people think of split testing as being akin to panning for gold – you grab a big chunk of dirt, and hope there’s something valuable in there.

So they test every random thing without any rhyme or reason, until they arrive at a combination better than what they’re already running.

This might work if you’ve got the traffic of a Google or Yahoo!, but I’m assuming that you don’t (and even if you did, it isn’t the smartest way to do things).

Your split testing should be planned and intentional; think about what is likely to have the most impact on your audience, and there for yield the best results.

If you’re not sure where to start, then use a framework to track your audience through the conversion process, to see where you need to start first – or ask someone you trust to weigh in and give you some advice.

Warning #2: Only Test ONE Thing at a Time!

After reading a post like this one, you might feel the urge to make a long list of things you want to test, and then create a new campaign implementing all of those tests.

Resist that urge!

The key to split testing is to isolate variables – in other words, you want to test one thing at a time, so that you know what is responsible for any changes that you observe.

Order your list by priority of what you think will make the most difference, and then test one thing at a time, until you are confident that the results are statistically significant (as described above – you can use free split test checkers to make sure that this has been accomplished).

So plan out your tests. Rank them by priority.

And start testing!

About the Author

Danny Iny is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the training program that turns non-marketers into expert marketers. Visit his site today to download a free split test checker, or follow him on Twitter @DannyIny.

Written By: Guest Author, Miles Baker

When I first signed up with ClickBank back in 1999 I had no idea I would eventually build a successful online business using its services. I’m sure the founders of ClickBank didn’t realize how large and successful its business platform would become either. Thanks to ClickBank I was able to quit my job over a decade ago and have since worked from home part-time while making more than a typical full-time income. Looking at my experiences over the past 12 years it’s amazing how much I’ve learned and how much has changed. It’s given me some interesting insights and definitely a unique perspective.

I’d like to share with you 12 insights I’ve gained over the past 12 years. Things I wish I had known in the beginning but took time and experience to learn. Leverage my experience and use these insights to guide you as you build your own online business over the next 12 years and beyond!

Perseverance – Overall this has been the most important factor in my online success. If you’re going to succeed online, especially in the long-term, you have to stick with it. You have to try out new things, test out different methods and never give up. I’ve seen too many people give up and quit too soon. When I started out I was determined to make it, nothing was going to stop me from making an income online, and eventually I did. Even to this day I have to continually overcome obstacles, but that’s how you have to view them, and that’s all they are. I like to think of it as climbing a mountain; if you want to get to the top you have to crawl over rocks, take detours, and sometimes head back down the mountain and take another path up. If you want long-term success there’s just no way around it, you must have perseverance.

Think Big – A lot of people online talk about niches and seeking out small, unexploited niches. However, I’ve seen many people go into niches that are too small to replace a full-time income. Although people can and have done well with small niches. In my experience I’ve always been more successful with larger niches. I’ve always had better success when my product, service, or website has appealed to a very large audience.

Always Keep Learning – After you achieve some success online you begin to feel like you know it all. It’s an easy trap to fall into. However, if you can humble yourself and take the attitude that you should always be seeking out new information from others (even if they’re younger or less experienced than you) you’ll continually find yourself learning new things you didn’t know.

Bi-Winning – Why be an affiliate or vendor when you can be both? Like most people, I started out on ClickBank as an affiliate. Eventually I became a vendor too. I learned very quickly that not only do you diversify and stabilize your income by being both an affiliate and vendor, but you can make more money too. Being both an affiliate and vendor allows you to cross promote. You can promote your own products through your affiliate channels and you can promote affiliate products on the back-end of your own products. It also gives you the ability to make money off your competitors! For instance,  whenever I get a refund on one of my products, I email that customer with a list of competitor products.  And yes, they are all affiliate links.

Opportunity for Income– Every page of content, every affiliate link and every ad is an opportunity for income. The more opportunities for income you have, the more money you’ll make. This doesn’t mean you should fill up your blog with as many affiliate links and ads as you can, it means you should create more blogs, more products, more services and more content, etc. Most of these methods are low maintenance once they’re set up, so you should strive to create as many opportunities for income as you can.

Fill in the Gaps – As you create more opportunities for income, you should also be filling in all the gaps for income in your current sales process. If you have a product you should be offering up-sells, setting up cross-sells with other vendors, and offering additional items for sale on your thank-you page. If you’re an affiliate you should be following up with customers that purchase through your site, using auto-responders to follow up with prospects, and up-selling wherever you have the opportunity. Filling in all the gaps was something I neglected for years but once I started doing it my income increased immediately.

Don’t Take it Personally – Early in my Internet marketing career I was very defensive. I would get into long email battles with people I didn’t even know! Looking back it was such a waste of time and my productivity suffered. What I’ve learned is that no matter how good of a job you do, no matter how much you try to help someone, there will always be negative people out there that will tear you down, criticize you, and try to sabotage your success. It’s not worth your time wasting it on these types of people. Whether someone leaves a nasty comment on your blog, sends you an email rant, or makes rude comments in a forum, just ignore them. Sometimes people are looking for a fight, do yourself a favor by not giving them what they want and don’t take it personally.

Let Others Do the Work– Your only limited resource in your online business is time. The only way to have more time is to do less of something else. There’s no other way. Delegating work through outsourcing or hiring employees will be the only way to eventually grow your business. Start outsourcing anything you can have others do, such as graphic design, blog installation, programming, etc. Outsourcing is cheap, effective, and leverages your time so you can do other things. It may be a struggle for you to delegate work you know you can do best, but it’s something you’ll need to overcome if you want to take your business to its highest potential.

Ditch Your Inner Introvert– Working at home on the computer all day can definitely make you an introvert. One huge mistake I made for years was not reaching out and meeting other Internet marketers. Once I started getting out of my office and going to conferences and events everything changed. I made connections with like-minded marketers, learned more than I had in years, and made fantastic friends as well. Internet marketing is a people business and people are your most valuable resource. Get out from behind the PC and get social, you never know what connections you will make and how it may improve your business and life as well.

Automate – When I first started marketing online I used to email all my customers their download information manually. Yes, each time I made a sale I rushed to send an email to them with their download link as fast as I could. Eventually I discovered automated ways of doing this as well as many other tasks that saved me countless hours. The great power of the Internet lies in being able to let technology do the work for you. Many things can be done automatically, such as backing up your websites, customer follow-up, posting content to you website, and so much more. Whenever you find yourself doing any kind of repetitive task look to see if it can be automated in some way. Chances are it can.

Test For Success – I never ran an official split-test for probably the first 7 or 8 years I was marketing online. Mostly because it wasn’t easy to setup like it is now, but also because I was just lazy. After running numerous split-tests over the last 5 years, I’ve realized I must have left loads of money on the table by not split-testing. Split-testing gives you instant results to improve your website and it will provide you with definitive answers as to which versions to keep and which to get rid of. Just about every successful marketer I know split-tests and it’s available to anyone for free using Google Website Optimizer.

It’s No Secret – When I first started out with ClickBank I was convinced I had to either have some original amazing idea or know some secret marketing technique or loophole to make a lot of money. Eventually I realized none of that was true. You don’t have to promote the perfect ClickBank product, you don’t have to know special affiliate secrets and you don’t need a huge marketing budget to be successful. One thing I’ve seen over and over again is that taking consistent action leads to results and over time leads to success. There’s really no secret. I think Lyle Lovett says it best… “It’s funny, but the biggest secret to success is that those at the top just seem to work the hardest. The reason it’s a secret is because nobody wants to believe it.”

About the Author

Miles Baker has been marketing online since 1997 and has been a ClickBank client for over 12 years. He currently resides in Fort Collins, CO where he runs ClickScoop.com, an up and coming community for ClickBank Vendors and Affiliates.

 

 

Written by: Guest Author, Mark Ling

Hey everyone,

I’m writing this blog post for ClickBank Affiliates (and this applies to vendors too for that matter) who are concerned about the impact of Google Panda‘s update has on the way in which they should be optimizing their sites for the search engines going forward.

Since February 24, Google has run several Panda updates (the most recent was Panda 2.2 on June 16, 2011). Firstly I want you to be aware that Panda is an update, not an entirely new ranking algorithm so many of the things you do to try to achieve high search engine rankings still apply as they used to.

The initial Panda update did in fact affect approximately 12% of the websites in Google, however the effects were much larger than Google has stated because most of the sites that were affected were websites that rank in the top pages of Google.

In addition, Google have also publicly stated on Google Webmaster Central Blog that Panda is not the only significant update that they’ve been running and that there will be more than 500 tweaks to their algorithms throughout the year. Furthermore, Google states “Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.”

What’s more, Google’s representative says, “In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. SEO is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.”

Google’s representative went on to list the following as questions that one could use to assess the quality of an article or a page:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

As you can see based on the questions above, Panda is an attempt for Google to assess websites that have too many low quality pages. If your site carries a Panda penalty, that doesn’t mean your site is out of Google, however it does mean that your website’s pages carry a penalty that makes it harder for them to get to the top of Google’s search results.

Also remember, if you make changes to your pages based on the information above, it may take several weeks before you notice changes to your rankings as Google only runs the Panda filter periodically to calculate the values it needs (about every 5 to 7 weeks).

Going forward, the key takeaway from this is that when you build your websites you need to start with your potential visitors in mind. This is a key distinction from those who have been creating websites based on highly searched for keywords and on securing low quality writers to throw up content based on those keywords.

You now have to think about producing content that users actually want to read.

This was always a good practice, however it has become even more important for those wanting to thrive with their affiliate sites (and vendor sites) going forward.

About the Author

Mark Ling is the founder of Affilorama. Visit Affilorama to gain free and instant access to over 100 hours of easy-to-follow, step by step video lessons on affiliate marketing, plus online web based tools and a community of over 150,000 members willing to help with your affiliate marketing success. Click here to visit Affilorama.