Posts Tagged ‘affiliate marketing’

Posted by: Miles Baker, Guest Blogger

Having been a publisher, affiliate, and even an affiliate manager over the past 10 years, I’ve been able to get a unique perspective on what it’s like to be on both sides of the affiliate/publisher relationship.

Given that insight, I’ve noticed most publishers are leaving money on the table when it comes to recruiting, assisting, and building relationships with their affiliates. Therefore, I’ve put together some of the most important things a publisher should be doing in order to build and nurture their affiliate base.

Be Available – Many times I’ve been eager to promote a product or service and have a question about it, but I am unable to find an email, phone number, or any way to contact the publisher. Sometimes, even if I do find that information and contact the publisher, I never hear back from them. This doesn’t leave me with much confidence as an affiliate promoting their product. Don’t make this fatal mistake; be available in some way. One easy way is to place an email or contact box on your site and then use the phone to follow up and further your relationship with your affiliates.

Use The Phone – Don’t be afraid to talk to people on the phone. This doesn’t mean you need to post your phone number on the Web. However, it does mean that you should be using the phone to talk with potential affiliates and build relationships with them, as well as maintaining relationships with your existing affiliates.

As a publisher, you are most likely very busy, and most people don’t have the resources for a dedicated affiliate manager or the time to talk to every affiliate that emails them. However, keep in mind the 80/20 rule, which applied here dictates that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your affiliates. If your time is limited, then at least make sure you’re talking with that top 20%.

Go To Conferences – This is the best place not only to learn, but also to meet potential affiliates and super affiliates. Going to an affiliate marketing conference like Affiliate Summit, for example, will allow you to meet new and existing affiliates, other publishers, and even people from ClickBank. When going to a conference, don’t try to recruit someone as an affiliate without getting to know the person first. Your purpose should be to get to know people and build relationships first, and then decide if they are a good candidate to be an affiliate for you.

Get Feedback – Now that you’re building relationships with your affiliates and you’re in regular communication with them, you’ll start getting priceless feedback. Listen to your affiliates, be proactive by encouraging feedback, and most importantly, take action on the feedback you get! The feedback you receive from your affiliates will help you to improve your products and services, conversions, and can give you numerous profitable insights.

As you can see, all my points are based around the same concept – the relationship. Affiliate management and recruitment is all about relationships. Whether you’re approaching potential affiliates in person or on the Web, or just working with existing affiliates, your approach should always be the same. You should work to build a great relationship with them. Not doing that is one of the biggest mistakes you could make as a publisher. Besides, you never know where that relationship might take you. I’ve known a few publishers who have even started new successful business ventures with one of their top affiliates.

Miles Baker has been marketing online since 1997 and has been a ClickBank client for almost a decade. He currently resides in Fort Collins, CO where he runs several online businesses and Web sites. You can reach Miles, learn more about him, and even view his live office cam at his Web site, MarketingWithMiles.com.

Posted by: Ashley Adamson, ClickBank Senior Customer Service Representative

This is part four of a five-part, five-day series about how publishers can attract more affiliates.

To really succeed as a ClickBank publisher, you need to get as many affiliates promoting your product as possible. In this five-part series, I show you some of the best techniques for becoming an affiliate magnet! Did you miss part one, two or three? Click to learn about how to take full advantage of the Marketplace or creating an affiliate tools page or getting your site right the first time.

Tip 4: Offer High Commissions

A penny saved is a penny earned? You’ve heard it all your life, but the sound advice your mother gave you could actually be damaging in the affiliate marketing industry.

When affiliates are looking for a new publisher to promote, they have thousands of products to choose from. Searching through each pitch page for the perfect product and sales copy is not always practical. Of course, having a professional, great-looking pitch page is important, but for most affiliates, other factors take priority.

Advertising costs can be expensive for affiliates. An affiliate wants to be able to look at a product and, in a glance, be able to trust that they’ll receive a positive return on their advertising and promotional investment. One of the most important stats in the ClickBank Marketplace that affiliates look for is “% sale.” This is the average commission percentage earned per affiliate per referred sale on a particular product. With many of our top products offering the maximum commission of 75%, you really can’t afford to not be generous with your commissions.

Though it may seem that the maximum payout amount is high, remember that these are sales you would not have made otherwise.

For more information about this subject, and data that proves the advantages of being generous with your commissions, check out our Generosity as Business Strategy article by Bob Dunlap:

http://www.clickbank.com/blog/2008/04/17/generosity-as-business-strategy/

Check back tomorrow for the fifth and final tip on becoming an affiliate magnet – advertising.

Posted by: Ashley Adamson, Senior Customer Service Representative

This is part three of a five-part, five-day series about how publishers can attract more affiliates.

To really succeed as a ClickBank publisher, you need to get as many affiliates promoting your product as possible. In this five-part series, I show you some of the best techniques for becoming an affiliate magnet! Did you miss part one or part two? Click to learn about how to take full advantage of the Marketplace or creating an affiliate page.

Tip 3: Get Your Site Right the First Time

When you’re sending in your first Product Approval Request, your top priority is probably getting your site active as quickly as possible. It certainly seems like a reasonable notion; the sooner you’re active, the sooner you can start receiving sales.

However, I strongly recommend that you take the time to perfect your site content, and to double-check that your Marketplace title and description are optimized to attract affiliates. You should make it clear what type of product you are selling and list the benefits affiliates receive by promoting your site.

There are third-party companies and sites on the Internet that feature newly-listed ClickBank products for a short period of time. If your site content is not optimum, you may be losing out on an opportunity for attracting affiliates right off the bat.

Check back tomorrow for the fourth tip on becoming an affiliate magnet – offering high commissions.

Posted by: Ashley Adamson, ClickBank Senior Customer Service Representative

This is part one of a five-part, five-day series about how publishers can attract more affiliates.

As many successful Internet marketers already know, ClickBank’s extensive affiliate network can be a powerful force for taking your product’s sales from mediocre to massive. Unlike most advertising and promotional efforts, ClickBank only pays out commissions to affiliates on your behalf for completed sales. This makes our affiliate program much more cost-effective than other traditional methods of product promotion. For example, when you place a paid advertisement in a search engine, you have to pay for the cost of the ad even if the clicks you get generate little or no sales. With our affiliate program, you are only paying for marketing costs when you’re actually making money.

To really succeed as a ClickBank publisher, you need to get as many affiliates promoting your product as possible. In this five-part series, I’ll show you some of the best techniques for becoming an affiliate magnet!

Tip 1: Take Advantage of the ClickBank Marketplace

ClickBank provides all new publishers the option of being listed within our ClickBank Marketplace: http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace

The question is, with the ClickBank Marketplace containing over 15,000 products, what can you do to obtain the most exposure and make your product attractive to affiliates?

The first thing that most new publishers don’t realize is that the majority of the Marketplace audience is comprised of affiliates, not consumers. So rather than have your Marketplace title and description tailored to consumers, you should use it to describe what makes your product appealing to affiliates.

Do you have a high commission percentage, a high payout or a Web site containing useful affiliate tools to help them promote your product? Be sure to list features like these in your Marketplace description so that affiliates can quickly see why they should promote your product.

To edit your Marketplace title/description, you’ll need to log in to your ClickBank account, click the “Account Settings” tab, the “My Site” link, and the “Edit” link under the “Marketplace Information” section, then modify your Marketplace description as needed.

Be sure to click “Save Changes” when finished!

Check back tomorrow for the second tip on becoming an affiliate magnet – creating an affiliate tools page.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

There’s an interesting article on MarketingSherpa touting the benefits of “nano-niche” marketing. Just about everyone involved with online marketing is well aware of the need to market products to well-targeted niches, but this idea takes things one step further and states that if you really want to stay recession-proof and get ahead of your competitors, you need to get laser-focused.

Tapping in to a highly motivated audience with little competition, and taking steps to gear your message towards them, can result in extraordinarily high returns on your investment. We talk a lot about the Long Tail here at ClickBank, and this idea is a perfect example of making the Long Tail work for you. You don’t need to drive a lot of traffic or spend a lot on advertising if you can achieve much higher conversion rates on the small amount of traffic you do have.

Nano-niche marketing is a perfect fit for affiliate marketing, since all that matters is how many visitors you convert into a sale, not your overall number of visits. Needing to drive huge amounts of untargeted traffic to your site is the old way of making money online. It used to be the case that using impression-based ad networks or programs like Google Adsense was the only way to make money, but that model doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of Internet marketers out there. In fact, at the recent BlogWorld conference I attended, these old monetization strategies were referred to several times as “webmaster welfare,” and the same experts instead recommended affiliate marketing and creating and selling your own products as the best ways to monetize a blog. The same holds true for just about any other type of website.

My recommendation is to take MarketingSherpa’s advice and start spending time identifying and targeting “nano-niches” in your area of expertise. The time you spend marketing to people in these ultra-focused niches will bring a much higher return on your efforts, giving you more time and resources to dedicate to finding other profitable niches. It’s time to think small!

Posted by: Terra Goeres, Manager, Client Account Management

As many of you are probably doing, I recently called my investment advisor, Paul, to see how my investments were performing. Knowing that the news would not be good, I had prepared a little “survival kit” for myself to get through the rest of the evening: a funny movie, a pizza, a cold beer, and a shot of tequila just to take the edge off after the conversation. So there I stood, teeth gritted, shot in hand, prepared to hear the worst. But just as I was getting ready to tip back the shot glass, I got a surprising answer to my question. “Not as bad as they could be,” said Paul. I set the shot down, wiped the sweat off my brow, and started breathing again. Paul went on to explain that because my portfolio was diversified, I was doing OK. Yes, it had gone down, but it was still performing better than the market.

That got me thinking about our affiliates and the different strategies I’ve seen people use to be successful on ClickBank. The one I’d like to talk about today is the single-niche strategy. Many affiliates choose to focus their marketing efforts on a single area of expertise. This is a great strategy, as long as that niche continues to perform well on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, not all products do. In my experience at ClickBank, I’ve come to recognize 3 types of products: One Hit Wonders, Peaks and Valleys, and Consistent Performers.

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ClickBank executives to attend Affiliate Summit

BROOMFIELD, Colo. – Aug 5, 2008 – Bob King, CEO of ClickBank, a privately held online retailer for buyers and sellers of digitally delivered products and services, will be offering his unique insights into the affiliate marketing industry on Monday, August 11, during the Affiliate Summit. The widely-respected industry conference takes place in Boston, at the Sea Port Hotel, between August 10-12.

Bob will be participating in the panel discussion, “The State of Ad Networks.” The panel will explore the trend within ad networks of moving from “cost per thousand” as the preferred method of gauging the price of advertising to a performance based model, where you get paid for what the ad produces in sales. ClickBank was founded on a pay-for-performance business model – affiliates and product publishers only get paid when a sale is made.

“Businesses are starting to realize something ClickBank has known for a decade — pay for performance is a better way to do business” said King. “With Internet advertising, it makes sense to seek those advertising models, and pricing structures, that can be tied directly to sales.”

Attending the Affiliate Summit with King are ClickBank executives Dush Ramachandran, vice president business development; Bob Dunlap, director of marketing; and Terra Goeres, manager of client account management. The four will be available to meet current and potential ClickBank affiliates and anyone interested in the company at table 23 during the “Meet Market” at the Affiliate Summit on Aug. 10, between noon to 6:00 p.m.

Posted by: Bob King, CEO

The blogosphere and affiliate marketers have been abuzz about New York’s new tax law that requires online retailers to collect and remit sales taxes on purchases by New York residents. The curveball New York threw in there was that the presence of affiliates in the state was a basis to establish nexus for tax purposes.

This got a lot more attention last week when Overstock.com summarily dropped all of its New York-based affiliates so it would not have to collect and remit taxes to that state.

While we are disappointed by New York’s decision, there is no way we are going to cut off our affiliates, our highly-valued business partners, because of an action by lawmakers.

The commitment we have to our New York affiliates goes for all ClickBank users, affiliates and product publishers alike. We do everything we can to ensure that you are successful so that means we adapt to new circumstances ….including changes in tax law. That’s just the way we do things around here.

So, New York affiliates, publishers, and consumers will have the systems they need by June 1. We’ll be sending out a technical announcement in the next few days on how it all works. And, rest assured, when changes in the marketplace impact affiliate marketers or product publishers, ClickBank will be there with solutions.