July 28th, 2008 admin
What does it take to become a successful Affiliate Marketer? What are the ingredients of an affiliate marketing success story? Is there a shortcut to Affiliate Marketing glory? All these questions play around in the minds of affiliate marketers who want to make it big in this business. Although affiliate marketing is touted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it is not as easy as it sounds. The wise affiliate marketer plans every action and executes it the best way he can. He should also maximize the potential to earn by utilizing the right tools necessary for a successful Affiliate Marketing business. We have consulted some of the most successful affiliate marketers in the business and below are the top three necessary tools for a successful affiliate marketing business.
Important Tool #1: Your Own Website
The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.
The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.
Important Tool #2: Incentives
Competition is extremely tight in the internet world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free softwares, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.
Important Tool #3: Link Popularity
The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important entities in the internet world. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign.
One of the best ways to do this – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles, with your website’s link at the resource box, to e-zines and free article sites. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free, just include a link back to your site. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick it up and post it.
These are but three of the many tools that an affiliate marketer can use to maximize earning potential. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination, creativity, resourcefulness and determination. You can always explore other ideas and adapt other strategies, which you think might help you become a high rolling affiliate marketer.
Posted in Making Money Online | 1 Comment »
July 21st, 2008 admin
Without doubt the biggest mistake a newbie to Adwords makes is compiling a long list of less than targeted keywords and whacking (technical term) them into a single ad-group.
Using broad match only
The unholiest of the trinity – not tracking results.
#1 The Single Adgroup
Although at first it may seem tempting – collecting all your keywords and lumping them into a single ad-group for ‘ease of administration’ is not a good idea for a multitude of reasons. First off, let’s say you have managed to find 1000 keywords for your campaign and you pop them all into a single ad-group. Yes, you get a single point of administration (or more accurately a single point of failure) but look at what you miss:
The ability to group tightly cohesive keywords (which are the mindset of your prospects) and construct targeted adverts which are more likely to gain a click through to your site.
The ability to have specific landing pages on your site for specific customer psychographics. This alone will greatly increase your chances of getting a prospect respond to your call to action – be it an email address capture or a sale.
The ability to keep tight control over the budget of your ‘best’ keywords (where best are high traffic/high conversion). Sure you can adjust individual CPC’s within an ad-group, but the granularity and control is not there and the problems inherent with grouping too many loosely assembled keywords will ensure your efforts are thwarted and money wasted.
Have you ever had your account slowed? It’s a pain for sure but the more keywords you have administered in a less than disciplined way, the more of your keywords will be put on hold/in-trial and/or disabled.
Remember Google rewards good advertising performance and looks at all advertiser histories & your advertising history when determining how well you are doing.
Adwords is not a fire and forget medium (unless you have a very niche market with very little competition – but the days of such markets are numbered).
Active campaign management is required to ensure you have not just a return of your investment but a positive return on your investment.
#2 Using Broad Match
Consider the keyword ‘widget’.
How many ways can you search for this keyword? In theory there are infinite number of searches that can be conducted but in practice there are considerably fewer thankfully. However, how should you specify your matching options within Adwords?
Option 1: Broad Match
This specifies the keyword in an unadorned fashion within your list like so:
Blue widget
What this means is that should somebody search for the keywords:
Blue widget
Red blue widget
Widget blue
Widget who searches for these things blue?
Don’t need blue widget
Then, your advert would show for all of these. This is all very well when broad match (I’ll not talk about expanded match searching for fear of confusion!) shows your advert for terms relevant to you. But…
For every term relevant to your market there could be 10, 100 or 1000 others which are not (which is why when you utilise broad matching you should use negative keywords exhaustively).
The upshot of this is two-fold:
- Your advert will have more untargeted impressions which will result in a lower Click Through Rate
- You will receive more ‘tyre kicking’ clicks from visitors who are not in the least bit interested in your product/service thus increasing your costs.
Option 2: Phrase match
This specifies the keyword by surrounding it in quotes like so:
“blue widget”
What this means is that should somebody search for the keywords:
Need blue widget
Blue widget
Blue widget where are you
Don’t need blue widget
Then your advert will show because the phrase is found within the keywords. This is the next most highly targeted form of search matching and is an ‘improvement’ on broad match – in terms of specialisation.
Option 3: Exact match
This specifies the keyword by surrounding it in square brackets like so:
[blue widget]
Now, your advert will only show if and only if the keyword
Blue widget
is searched for.
In an ideal world, you will know exactly what every keyword is that your prospects are searching for and you could therefore have an exact match for a keyword search. This would serve to both minimize your advertising expenditure and increase your return on investment simultaneously. But, to get to a point whereby you know the keywords (or at least know as many as possible) which are profitable to you, you need to conduct some research within your adwords campaigns.
So which is the best matching options to use? Starting off, it is best to utilise all 3 matching options within your ad-group because:
You get to know if there are keywords out there you have missed in your research and can dig further to find out if they should be specified with more targeted matching or added to your negative keyword list.
The assignment of your keyword status (on hold, in trial, disabled) is delayed because the impressions are spread between the variants of the keywords.
More targeted terms (using exact match) generally have higher conversion rates so you can assign different more cost effect cost per clicks accordingly.
Eventually, as your campaigns mature in time, you will have more and more exact match and less phrase & broad match. As a result your advertising costs will decrease whilst your return on investment will naturally increase.
#3 The Unholiest Error
Ok, this isn’t an adwords tip perse as it should be adopted and applied to each and every part of your online and offline advertising.
It’s time to be honest – for each and every piece of advertising/PR you have on the go, how well are you tracking results?
I mean can you categorically put your hand on your heart and say, “Yes, by handing out business cards, I generated £x of business last month” (doh! – I’ve just got a new batch printed up and even I’ve missed out on this, slap my wrist, practice what you preach Tom!). In the world of Adwords, you need to know what keywords are giving you results and focus your budget and efforts accordingly. If you have an advert that shunts prospects to a generic landing page, which is not tracked and you have no idea as a result whether they signed up or bought a product/service. Then, you are wasting tens, hundreds, thousands (bigger companies are some of the worst offenders wasting millions) of pounds every year.
Now you can no longer claim ignorance on the biggest mistakes made with Google Adwords. And I shall make sure my next batch of business cards are trackable!
Posted in Making Money Online | 1 Comment »
July 10th, 2008 admin
Imagine that you could earn commissions on a popular brand-name product just by placing a link on your website or in your email. That, my friends, is “Affiliate Marketing”!
OK… So it’s not quite that simple, but it doesn’t have to be much more complicated either. Let’s start with a few definitions. An advertiser, or merchant, is the company who is selling a product. An affiliate, sometimes referred to as a publisher or partner, is another person or company who assists in the promotion of the product and earns a commission for doing so. (That could be you!) In between is the account management service that partners the advertisers with the affiliates and keeps track of the sales and commissions.
If you want to become an affiliate, you first need to choose either a product you want to sell, or an account management service. You will end up with both, but the choice of one will determine the choice for the other. If you choose the product first, the advertiser will direct you to the account management service that they already work with. If you choose the account management service first, they will provide you with a list of merchants that they do business with.
To see if your favorite product or company offers an affiliate program, go to their website and check the menu bar or the bottom of the screen. Look around for the word “affiliate”. Click on that link, read about their program and requirements, and fill out their application. Some companies require specific types of websites to place their links on. They will email you all you need to know to get started. If you don’t know what specific product you would like to promote, or if you want to promote several, I recommend browsing the participating merchants on the account management service’s website.
Try to stick to products or ideas that you are familiar with and passionate about. It will be much easier to market to your visitors if you can add value to the link you want them to click on. Personal recommendations or stories will get way better results than just a banner or solo text link. Give them a reason to “click here”.
Welcome to the world of Affiliate Marketing!
Posted in Making Money Online | 2 Comments »
