The Affiliate Business

The Affiliate Business

Your affiliate marketing business is just that ... a business. To be successful, you need to treat your business like a business and focus on growth. Your affiliate links are your business; you are the owner of a marketing company, and it is an asset you can grow into more and more assets. Here are three strategies to build your marketing business.

1. Get your own website and domain name.
It looks cheap and marks you as a "newbie" when you post a long affiliate link in your ads. With domain names as inexpensive as they are now you can purchase your own domain name. You can then either forward your URL to your affiliate link or set yourself up with some free hosting and establish more of a web presence. Your best bet is to write a benefit-full description of your affiliate program and link to your program via an HTML link that is part of your description.

2. Build your own list.
Stop relying on one-shot ads to make you money. Real businesses have repeat customers that they cultivate in order to make more profits. You must do the same. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site. Create an email list to keep in touch. Send out periodic tips or articles and focus on helping your customers. Only promote your affiliate links in unobtrusive ways; don't make your emails one big ad.

One of the best ways to build traffic to your list is to write a short report that describes the benefits of your affiliate program. Make this report available only by email. When someone sends for your report, they are added to your list and you can continue to communicate with them.



 3. Build traffic to your own site and list.
This is where you really make your affiliate links your own business. By having your own site and building your own list you are building your own business and brand, not just marketing someone else's. By doing this, you can market to your own customers over and over again.

Do not overlook this point: When your ad redirects a customer to your affiliate link, you have lost that person as your own customer because you lost the ability to communicate with them on a repeat basis. When you direct customers to your own site and list, they build a relationship with you.

There are many ways to build traffic: write articles, post in forums, market in safelists, advertise offline, etc. My advice is to pick one traffic-building method, work on it for awhile, and master it before moving on to something else. If you focus on offline advertising, write and rewrite your ads until you determine how to get the best response. If you market on safelists, make a list of the top 50, and send your ad to 10 each day. Keep testing to make sure your safelists are responsive.

These three strategies will help you build and grow your affiliate marketing business.

Top Blogging Tools

Top Blogging Tools

The popularity and usefulness of blogging has made it one of the fastest-growing online industries. From personal to business blogs, it is estimated that more than 50 million weblogs have been published, with thousands more starting up each and every day. If you have ever wanted to explore the world of blogging, you should first check out some of the top blogging technologies to discover which tools are right for your Web publishing needs.

Before you begin, consider your reasons for starting a blog. Are you promoting a business, or do you simply want a place to host a personal online journal? Are you blogging to market affiliate programs, or do you want to feature banner and link ads to generate income? If your needs are fairly simple, one of the many free blogging services will probably be perfect for your needs. For bloggers with more complex needs, you may need paid blog technologies and Web hosting services. Blogs serve as excellent content management systems that can be created in a matter of minutes and are easy to use. The following tools are among those used most often by avid bloggers.



Popular Blogging Tools

WordPress is one of the top blogging tools, voted a ‘Forbes Favorite' by Forbes.com. The open-source application offers a wide range of applications and is the perfect choice for users who want to host their blog on their own website. If you're looking for a high-quality blogging tools that offer a wide range of features, WordPress just might be the perfect choice for you.

Blogger is extremely popular for both business and personal blogging. Provided by Google, this free service offers great features such as free hosting, the ability to add banner and text advertising links, and a great range of beautifully designed templates.

TypePad is owned by Six Apart, the same company that offers the popular blogging tools Moveable Type and Live Journal. Basic membership starts at five dollars a month for a hosted blog and offers the ability to post via email or mobile phone.

Moveable Type has gained popularity for use as a business blogging tool. Free options are limited, but paying members have access to improved support, design options, and posting access. Beginners often report difficulty with this blogging platform, but many intermediate and advanced users are committed Moveable Type fans.

Live Journal is a wonderful option for users who prefer community-based blogging. This popular service offers both free and paid options with the ability to connect to friends and join community groups.

Top Blogging Promotional Tools

Once you've started blogging, its time to promote your weblog to the world. There are a number of great services that have emerged specifically to track the millions of blogs that are updated every day. Other great ways to advertise your blog include social bookmarking sites and blogrolls. A blogroll is basically a list of links to related blogs. The following are some of the most popular blogging promotional tools.

Technorati is one of the leading trackers of weblogs. By signing up and adding Technorati links to your blog, you can gain traffic from searchers who use the service to find blogs of interest. This is a great way to locate niche blogs on highly specific topics.

Del.icio.us is one of the most-used social bookmarking sites of the Web. Users can add interesting links to their del.icio.us bookmarks and share their lists with other users. The service also allows users to ‘tag' links by subject, so related posts can be found quickly and easily.

Digg allows community members to rank stories, websites, articles, and blog posts. You can add a links to your blog that allow users to quickly submit the content to Digg. Stories are promoted on the site based on user-rankings and popularity.

No matter what blogging technologies you choose to use, always remember that the key to a great blog is interesting content. Write about the things that interest you and that you are passionate about. Express your personality and become an active participant in the blogging community in order to benefit from all that weblogs have to offer.

Top 10 Affiliates Marketing Tips

Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Tips

Marketers with successful affiliate marketing programs know that the affiliate channel is a cost-effective way to drive incremental revenue. But as with any marketing strategy, if you don't consistently apply best practices to your tactical efforts, you're likely to have disappointing results. Here are ten things you should focus on to improve the performance of your affiliate marketing program:

1. Optimized Data Feed:

The easiest way to get increased distribution is to have the most robust, complete, up to date product catalog possible. This makes your products immediately available to publishers and across comparison shopping engines. It's also the thing we hear most often from publishers as being the most critical piece to working successfully with advertisers.

2. Effective Creative:

Publishers, also known as affiliates, spend time and money promoting your products or services, so you need to make sure you provide effective creative to help them sell your products. Effective creative has consistent brand messaging and a consistent look and feel every place the consumer interacts with it in the buyor- try conversion funnel, from the banner on a publisher's site to your landing page to your shopping cart or lead form. Effective creative also has a clear and highly visible call to action and a compelling offer (see #3 below).



3. Competitive Offers:

Are your offers in line with your vertical or industry? Take a look at what your competitors are offering for similar products or services and evaluate whether or not your margins allow you to provide a comparable or better offer. The trend of offering free expedited shipping proved successful for online retailers during the 2009 holiday shopping season and is continuing to be popular with consumers in 2010.

4. Deep Linking:

It's well known that that deep linking (linking directly from your offer on a publisher's site to the landing page where the product or service can be ordered) converts better than linking to your home page. The fewer pages a consumer has to click to before reaching the item, the more likely that shopper will complete the purchase. An easy way for online retailers to provide publishers with their complete and up-to-date product catalogs is through the use of data feeds, which a comprehensive affiliate marketing solutions provider can set you up with (see #1 above).



5. Optimized Landing Pages:

Your publishers can drive quality traffic for you all day every day, but if your landing pages aren't optimized, then your conversion rate will suffer. Make sure that there's visual consistency between your ads and landing pages, that your copy resonates with your target audience and that you follow through on the promise of your ad by making it clear what shoppers need to do next to get the special offer.

6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)/Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Search publishers in the affiliate channel can complement your existing investment in PPC by filling in the gaps in your current search strategy whether that is managed through in-house program or through a search agency. These specialized publishers are able to elevate your ranking on the search engine results page where you may be outranked by your competition. In addition, if you're not using paid and/or natural search campaigns to test the effectiveness of your ad copy, you're essentially just guessing at what works.

7. Simple Checkout Process:

Streamline your checkout process to reduce the steps required to purchase a product. To prevent shopping cart abandonment, list shipping charges early in the checkout process and include thumbnail images of items next to their descriptions to provide a visual reminder for customers returning to their carts from previous visits.

8. Incentives:

Top-performing publishers drive the majority of your revenue and expect to be compensated accordingly. So don't let them down by offering the standard commission you give to all your publishers. By offering special incentives that you tie to a specific product or to a volume or time-based goal, you're letting your best publishers know that you'll reward them for achieving the results you need.

9. Communication:

Lack of communication with your publishers is the cause of many failed relationships. Make it a priority to communicate frequently and clearly with your publishers using the methods they prefer. Many publishers rely on email or instant messaging, but there may be times when they'd appreciate it if you picked up the phone or visited in person - this especially applies to your top revenue-producing publishers.

10. Quality Online Presence:

When was the last time you looked critically at your Web site? If it takes forever to load, has confusing navigation or amateurish graphic design, then consumers are likely to perceive your products and services negatively. Invest in a graphic designer or user interaction designer (or a talented intern) who is skilled at presenting information from a consumer's point of view rather than from a corporate perspective.

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Small Affiliates Still Growing

Small Affiliates Still Growing

Despite loudly proclaiming doom, small affiliates seems to be riding the economic tsunami well.

Small affiliates are doing well, it seems, because they target niche markets and keep costs low. Start-up websiteswhich create and aggregate content about topics like sports, business and health, are recording sharp gains in visitors and revenue. Some are also landing distribution partnerships with big media brands eager for cheap content during the recession.



The number of visitors to sports Web site SB Nation, for instance, rose 15 percent from December to a total of 3.4 million in January, according to the company, even as unique visitors to the category of sports sites tracked by comScore Inc. fell 2 percent. SB Nation launched a partnership with Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo Sports last week and has signed another deal with Gannett Co.'s USA Today."Consumer engagement is shifting toward niche-content experiences," Andrew Braccia, a partner at venture-capital firm Accel Partners, told the WSJ. Braccia, who sits on the board of SB Nation, added that "Three to five years from now, people will no longer be drawing a distinction between traditional forms of publishing and what we know as blogs today."

The Right Keyword Bidding Approach

The Right Keyword Bidding Approach

 Affiliate Keyword bidding techniques are not created equal. With four incredibly different types of approaches, understanding their differences is a challenge in and of itself. But knowing the differences and applying the correct approach to your paid search program and campaign goals can translate into significant performance gains.

Now the question is when and how to use the choices available to you. Over the past few years, digital marketing platforms and consultants have helped advertisers optimize paid search spend using a combination of human analysts and rules and model-based bid optimization software. In this case, technology has played a major role in scaling the challenge of daily bidding on tens of thousands to millions of keywords, from the head to the extreme tail. However, there is still confusion around when to use rules-based bidding or the three major model-based bidding techniques: local optimization, global cluster modeling and global keyword-level modeling. We'll explore the differences between each approach and examine the outcomes.

Rules-Based Bidding

Rules-based bidding is all about reacting to situations, rather than predicting and adjusting by learning from historical conversion data. Advertisers who forego using tail terms and instead focus only on head terms often use rules-based bidding. This strategy works when you're only dealing with a few keywords and have the resources to leverage human analysis, versus optimization software. Of course, this method can only scale so far, as it requires paid search professionals to provide analysis and crunch the numbers on the fly.

Local Optimization

With model-based approaches, it's important to make the distinction between local and global optimization. Local optimization bids each keyword so it achieves the goal in an SEM program, while global optimization (sometimes referred to as a portfolio approach) considers all keywords at once. Using the global approach, bids are assigned so that, on average, the whole group is maximized for a goal. The global approach usually provides higher value from a set of keywords, compared to local optimization, because with local, some keywords are overbid, while others are underbid to achieve the goal, and that results in poor financial performance.

Global Optimization: Cluster-Modeling

Within global keyword modeling there are two approaches: cluster-based modeling and keyword-level modeling. Cluster-based modeling was developed to cope with the data problem surrounding tail terms. Because there was very little historic data for these terms, clusters aggregated data from hundreds or even thousands of keywords, allowing analysts to apply traditional statistical techniques to determine bids. Keyword clusters lead to prediction stability - however, each keyword is actually unique, which ultimately results in a loss of performance when compared to modeling each keyword individually

Clustering has another consideration - the manual tuning needed to optimize the keyword clusters means human analysis is needed on a regular basis on top of the software required to automate the bidding for the clusters. Also, it's very time-intensive to create the clusters to begin with. In fact, this is the biggest issue, because as a cluster ages, performance decays. Combatting this becomes very expensive.

Global Optimization: Keyword-Level Modeling

As mentioned before, keyword-level modeling is another option for advertisers - however, many believed it couldn't be done, because there wasn't enough tail term behavior data available to build accurate models. This is no longer the case. Keyword-level modeling is possible, due to optimization technology developments and sophisticated mathematical techniques.

Leveraging advanced math, software automation and transparency into specific variables that drive individual keyword performance, advertisers can create models for all keywords in an SEM program, not just the low-hanging fruit of head terms. This can result in overall performance gains of over 25 percent compared to clustering, local optimization and rules-based techniques.

The Takeaway

For advertisers looking to create only brand awareness, rules-based bidding works toward driving traffic. Rules-based bidding is a good option for advertisers who aren't seeking revenue - rather, they're working toward impressions.

Meanwhile, advertisers who aren't operating with constraints can leverage local optimization. If there's an explicit goal - for example, to drive as many orders as possible, without regard to cost or profit - local optimization will achieve those results. Granted, most advertisers do have constraints, which makes global clusters an alternative if advertisers only need to track conversions at the campaign level.

For advertisers who want more transparency and deal with large numbers of keywords, keyword-level modeling provides the opportunity to automate bidding while avoiding the performance and maintenance issues associated with clustering. Because this type of modeling provides transparency into the variables that drive keyword performance, keyword-level modeling can result in dramatic campaign gains when dealing with tens of thousands to millions of keywords, whether they're head or tail terms. Compared to the other keyword bidding techniques, keyword-level modeling is ideal for advertisers looking to maximize both head and tail terms, while having transparence and control over a SEM program.

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THE BASICS OF BLOGGING AND ONLINE PUBKISHING

By Brandon Cox

Blogging is such a weird word. We never used it until people started keeping “logs” on the “web” of their life called “weblog” and for some reason, we dropped the “we” and were left with the art of blogging. And in a sense, it has changed everything. How? Because now, everyone is a publisher.

Every business, and every institution is now a publisher, and those who publish with the most gusto win. It’s the age where people with few connections and little resources can grow their voice in the marketplace in inexpensive and creative ways.

I’m writing this post for those who haven’t jumped in yet. I’d love to dialog about the latest developer’s beta version of WordPress or Google’s search algorithm, but my goal is instead to reach out to those who are on the verge of blogging and push you over the edge to take the dive. If you need to read no more, head over to WordPress or Tumblr and get started! If you’re still looking to rationalize your decision, read on…

WHY BLOG?

Still with me? Let me give you some reasons to jump in.

Everybody is doing it. This is normally a stupid reason to do anything, but in this case, what I mean is that everybody is talking and conversing about everything, and your voice matters.

It’s easy. There was a time when you needed to know html or write the code for your own blogging platform. Now, with a few clicks you can sign up and from your smartphone, you can blog.

It’s cheap. In fact, it’s usually free, or costs peanuts, to get started.You can earn some income. Don’t plan on getting rich off of blogging. It’s been done before and will be done again, but don’t assume you’re going to be the next John Chow, who makes money online by telling people how to make money online. Most of the “six-figure bloggers” were in the game early, but you can still earn a bit of an income if you’re patient and consistent.You can expand your influence. Ideas change the world, and today, ideas are shaped by the conversation online.

In other words, this isn’t just for geeks and nerds anymore. It’s for you too (assuming you don’t fall into either of those categories).

WHAT TO DO

Convinced? With me? Good.

Now what in the world are you going to blog about?
What does “blogging” look like for you? You can make blogging a time of personal journaling, but I want to challenge you to think a little harder than that. Let’s re-define blogging as putting your passion into words for the world to experience.

Your passion.

If you are passionate about underwater basket-weaving, blog about it. If it’s vintage and retro living, go for it. If you’re all about the latest flip-flops coming out of the fashion scene, blog about it. The blogs I read are those written by people who are passionate, whose passion spills out in a contagious way. In words.

Blogging can include video and other forms of media, and will more and more as time goes on. What I’m getting at is that blogging is the act of allowing your passion to escape your heart and find expression online in a form others can consume.

For the world to experience.

I talk a lot about the experience of reading blogs because I’m a design and communications nut. For me, content is highly important, but so is its aesthetic surroundings. I’m not drawn to mere words. I’m drawn to the experience of reading them in their creative context.

BLOG ON TOPIC

So blog about what you know, what you love, and what you can speak authoritatively about to the world. Stay focused. I blog about an array of subjects, but they are mostly related to each other. If I started blogging entirely about weedrat recipes, I’d lose my readers, no matter how good weedrat stew might be.

NETWORK WITH OTHERS

Writing is good, but reading is better. Speaking is great, but listening is even greater.

Blogging isn’t simply the dissemination of information. Rather it’s the joining of an ongoing, developing conversation about a niche. The more people you help, connect with, and pour into, the more you and your blogging influence will ultimately benefit.

READ GREAT BLOGS ON BLOGGING

Don’t read them all – you’ll go nuts. There are too many of them.

But some of my own favorites are:
WeBlogBetter.com (I started this one, but Kiesha Easley has taken it beyond my wildest dreams).
ProBlogger (A lot about earning money, but a lot about powerful networking too).
Copyblogger (A whole lot of longer posts about writing, communication, and marketing).
Fuel Your Blogging (I used to be the Editor, but Christopher is much better!).
Kikolani (She gathers together some of the best resources on the web).
Social Media Examiner (Not all about blogging, but the broader topic of social media, of which blogging is one part).
Chris Brogan (An expert who blogs his expertise rather freely).
Danny Brown (Few understand blogging activism like Danny).
Michael Hyatt (He understands blogging from the perspective of a respected publishing executive).
For Bloggers By Bloggers (A steady stream of great tips).
Blogussion (Another great site with great tips).
Hubspot offers another list of great blogs too.

JUMP IN!

Here’s my step-by-step guide to getting started with blogging in a half an hour or less. Understand that if you can get hosting, a domain, and a custom-designed WordPress theme, you’ll be better off in the long run. But this isn’t the long run. This is the moment of taking the plunge.

So here’s my challenge:
Sign up for an account at here.
Pick a nice theme that reflects the personality of your blog. You can change later, and even move your WordPress blog to a self-hosted platform. For now, pick something pretty.
Create an “About” page where you tell the world whom you are and other ways to connect with you (link to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social profiles).Write a blog post. No, “This is your first blog post.” doesn’t count. Craft a catchy, attention-getting title and briefly pour your heart out.

Post the hyperlink on Twitter, Facebook, and wherever else you hang out online. Don’t be shy. Do it!

Oh, and below, in the comments, tell me where you blog! What would you add to what I’ve said (for the soon-to-be newbie bloggers)?

Source: BrandonACox.com

Step by Step Blogging System

If you’re a blogger, your most common problem is likely not knowing what to write. You open your word processor or editor to find a blank canvas staring back at you, which causes the same thing to happen to your mind — it goes blank.
Week after week, you struggle to pull together coherent posts that are just this side of rambling, and in the back of your mind, you know that you’re not doing the best job of managing your blog to ensure that it helps you reach your goals.

The solution?
Develop a system around your blogging efforts. 
Here are the steps I took to create a system for producing and managing content for my own site.

About a month ago, I was approaching yet another week of blank canvases, so I set out to find a way to be more intentional and focused with my content. The first thing that came to mind was an editorial calendar. Big magazines and newspapers have used them since the dawn of the publishing industry, so I was fairly confident the solution would work for me, but I didn’t want to just throw together a calendar in spreadsheet form and think that all my problems would go away. I really wanted to approach this as a big magazine would, so I started by thinking in terms of a single magazine issue and how an editor might produce andmanage its content.

Step 1: Choose a Theme

If you think about a single magazine issue, there’s generally a theme to it, a common thread that ties together the articles within it, so that was my first step — develop a theme. I decided to have “focus months” on my site to guide the content for a given month. This would help me accomplish a couple of things. 
First, it would make my content more intentional. It would center my efforts around keywords and information that was relevant to my target audience.
Second, it would help me better anticipate the content I was going to create, which would allow me to line up guest experts and interviews that were relevant to the content.
I was immediately able to come up with themes for the next six months.

Step 2: Choose Your Sub-Topics

Once I had a theme in mind, I was able to think about sub-topics within that theme that would deepen my coverage of the content that month. At first, I just listed out the possibilities for sub-topics without thinking too much about them, and created a list of ten or twelve ideas. As I created the list, I noted possible guest experts who might provide greater insight into the sub-topics than I could provide on my own.

Step 3: Establish Your Schedule and Content Needs

With my topic and sub-topics ready, I had to decide on the frequency I would publish. I settled on publishing one content piece per day (could be an article, an audio piece, etc.). I decided to interview guest experts within the sub-topics and then spread out the content over the course of the month.

My plan would be to line up and interview guests the month before I intended to publish the content. That way, I would avoid last-minute scrambling to produce content and could instead focus on quality well in advance of publishing. This would also help when I got sick or took time off, since I would already have content on tap for the given week or month and could simply schedule it to be published (or, even better, hire someone else to do it for me).

I decided that the number of weeks there were in a given month would be the number of guest experts I would line up for that month (five weeks, five guest experts). And to make things simple, each guest expert would produce one week’s worth of content (five content pieces per guest).

My site has a mix of articles and audio, so I decided to do one-hour interviews with each guest (and then each interview would be divided into four shorter content pieces) and then have each guest contribute one article in addition to their interview. That made it really easy on my guests, since they only had to show up for a one-hour interview and create one article. Plus, that little bit of effort on their part would equate to weekly promotion for their businesses, since I would be spreading their content out over the course of the month.

The great thing for me was, instead of having twenty to twenty-five separate content pieces to create on my own in a given month, I would simply do four to five interviews (depending on the number of weeks that month) and knock out four content pieces in one hour. Of course, that meant a lot more planning on the front end, but then the actual content creation part would become very easy.

Step 4: Produce the Content

So, I knew how many guest experts I would have (the same as the number of weeks that month), and I knew how many content pieces I needed from each of guest (always five), so that let me know how many titles I had to create for the month.

Say, for instance, the month’s theme was “balance.” I knew I needed five content pieces, so I created five generic titles.
Stress-Reduction Tips
Personal Renewal
Food and Mood
Balancing Home and Work Life
Disconnecting from Technology

Then I could create more interesting titles from the generic ones:
60-Second Stress-Busting Techniques
The Importance of Personal Renewal
Is Food Affecting Your Mood?
Creative Ways to Balance Work and Home Life
Cut the Cord: How to Disconnect from the World

This part was surprisingly simple. While I normally could sit and ponder blog post titles for what seemed like hours, I was immediately able to think of several ideas when thinking about picking the brains of experts on a given topic.

Step 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

I had my theme, my sub-topics, and even the specific post titles for the content I wanted to create. All that was left to do was actually create the content, edit it, and publish it. That meant that I actually had to conduct the interviews and then lay out exactly when I was going to edit and publish the audio and articles contributed by the guests.

Why a System? Why Not Just Blog?

If you’re running a business blog, there’s generally an underlying purpose behind it. Maybe you want more clients or to create a fan base for an upcoming book. Whatever the case, there’s a reason that you blog, and the content you create should help you reach your end goal. By being more intentional and focused with your content, you’ll achieve greater success in a much shorter period of time and make sure that your content is, in fact, serving the audience it’s intended to serve.

My favorite things about having a system?
Content has become so much easier to create
My efforts are more focused and are helping me reach my goalsI’m more intentional when it comes to guests, which means greater cross-promotion, back links, and visibility with new audiences.
I’m no longer staring at a blank screen wondering what I’m going to write.

So, what’s your blogging system?
How are you staying on track and organized when it comes to your blogging efforts?

THIS IS THE BLOGGING SYSTEM!!

by amber singleton riviere
AUG. 26, 2010
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