Archive for the 'Affiliate Marketing' Category
I am sitting here, attending the DaVinci Institute “Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp“, listening to Anita Edge (www.BaseCampWebVentures.com), Byron Walker (www.UltimateResultsNow.com) and Dush Ramachandran from ClickBank (www.ClickBank.com) about Affiliate Marketing and wanted to throw out this little nugget of knowledge that is critical for newbie Affiliate Marketer (like me).
What you have to understand is that the whole arena of Affiliate Marketing is (1) directed at the situation where the purchase of the product or service is a one-to-one transaction and (2) there are a large number of combinations of the different mechanisms to implement your marketing approach.
On the first point, the Affiliate Marketing concept does not work well when there are multiple people involved in the purchase. This is why “Corporate Sales” are not typically handled through this mechanism. The whole idea is that the person who is making the search (or finding your blog or whatever) is the person that will be making the purchasing decision. This point is also why the Landing Page is most effective when it is based on personal reviews and/or testimonials because these sorts of purchases are typically going to have a significant emotional component.
In attempting to understand the world of Affiliate Marketing, it is important to understand that there are large number of approaches to Affiliate Marketing. However, it can be distilled down to a four step process (when looked at from 50,000 feet). (1) Find a niche and product that you want to market, (2) generate traffic to your Landing Page (LP), (3) provide some information about the product that will provide more incentive for the potential customer to want to learn more about the product and finally (4) generate a sale. The Affiliate Marketer is the one that does steps 1, 2 and 3 with the 4th step being the responsibility of the Merchant.
One other piece of advice that I learned and came up again during this Boot Camp was that when you are starting, you need to figure out which method of generating traffic (#2 above) you are going to use and stay focused on that approach. If you choose to do SEO, then put all of your energy into getting your organic rankings up and thereby increasing your traffic. Don’t worry about PPC or blogs or articles to start with. Once you get good at whichever approach you want to use (and more importantly are making money) then you can branch out if that is really critical to you and your self-esteem. You will hear lots of “mentors / coaches” telling you that you need to do articles, blogs, email lists and PPC. However, all that this will do is to bury you in possibilities and you won’t be good at any of them. Start simple and straight-forward and then expand in whatever direction you want to go.
Those are two little nuggets that you can keep in mind while considering your next move in Affiliate Marketing. I know that the second point is one that I struggled with for
After fighting with my “Art Jobs” campaign, I realized that I was struggling with a couple of different issues. The first is that there are a huge number of variables all of which need to be aligned. The second was that I was building a separate landing page for each AdGroup. Plus, I didn’t have a good means to manage all of that. At the same time, my landing page was really bad so creating more versions of it weren’t going to produce any additional results.
With all of this plus a low budget, lack of experience, and without the tools, I was struggling to get anywhere with the campaign. At the same time, I have been working with Byron Walker (www.UltimateResultsNow.com) and he has a great new product in the solar energy niche which was of great interest to me. I was also working on a method of tracking the clicks, where they came from, how they got there and where they went. It’s not super difficult but works pretty well.
So, all of this together, I shut down the ArtJobs campaign and generated the newest EnergyAtHome.biz landing page. My landing page is a lot better than the ArtJobs campaign landing pages. At the same time, I am able to track how things are working.
One thing that I found, when I started this new EnergyAtHome.biz campaign, is that the cost for the keywords that I chose are quite a bit higher than what I was expecting. When I started seeing this, I was a little concerned that it wasn’t going to be a profitable venture. However, given the alignment with Byron and the fact that I will be attending his “Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp” through the DaVinci Institute, I decided that I wanted to work with the program and see where I come to. We will just have to see how things go.
Finally, the other thing that I decided to do was to sign up with Microsoft Advertising Center. I did this in order to get access to their keyword / pricing information. In order to try out the service, I got signed up and created a campaign there. There were some interesting insights there that I will talk about later. But suffice it to say, I think there might be some opportunities here. Again, we have to wait and see.
I just found a great little resource to learn some of the basics of SEO. Its from a company called “SEO Traffic Spider“. I don’t know anything about their services but they have a great website and lots of useful information. I am not using SEO to a great extent but it does relate to Affiliate Marketing as well. Use it in good health.
Finished out the “Make Energy” campaign with DIYPowerSystems. Overall, it didn’t do too badly although I didn’t get any sales. My best ad received a CTR of 0.33% which is fairly low based on what I have been reading (would have liked ~2%). However, it did show the difference between ads and landing pages. The other interesting statistic was that the ads varied quite a bit in how effective the landing pages were in getting people to hop to the supplier’s page. The one thing that was a little frustrating was that the conversion rate at the supplier’s page wasn’t as good as I was led to believe. I have contacted my mentor over there to see if he has any thoughts. Oh well, its a learning process.
Now I am off to my next campaign. This time I am going with a campaign that I got from subscribing to the Copy-N-Profit program. Supposedly, all you have to do is copy their campaign and it will start making money. I was hung up a little getting my domain names ready otherwise I would have probably put this one up first. This campaign is in the “Jobs For Artists” niche. We will see how things go.
I have started my work on doing Affiliate Marketing. What I finally figured out is that the use of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is one alternative for generating traffic (Duh!?!). However, it was a fairly significant epiphany that allowed me to focus on a method that I could understand and for which I see potential. The other paths (articles, blogs, SEO, etc) are not ones that I felt comfortable with. All of that said, I am started running a couple of campaigns.
One of the things that I needed to do was to decide where I was going to focus (also know as market niche). Its important to do this, especially when getting started, to allow you to have a little better chance of making things work.
So, my first campaign is underway. I am using Google Adwords and have built my own landing pages. I am working through ClickBank (www.ClickBank.com) and am focusing on a single product (DIYPowerSystems). I am going to let that run for a few days and see what happens. I have another campaign ready to go in the Jobs for Artists as well that I am then going to turn on after that to see if that one works any differently.
One of the things that drove me down this road is that it is a completely different type of work than what I have been doing previously and I do believe that it has the opportunity to make money (the question being how much is possible). At the same time, it can truly be done from anywhere. This is something that I have done in the past with software development but there is always the question of how you find and work with your customers. In the affiliate marketing world, it truly allows all portions of the transaction to be done online. The other aspect of this was that I had a vision about where I might be headed. I had an interview at a company downtown. The parking in that area is not very good and very expensive. As I was driving down there, I saw myself riding the bus to work and using a netbook to do my affiliate marketing work in the morning and evening ride. I am also going to be interviewing at DIA which would be the same thing but longer. Who knows, that might be my future. We’ll see.
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