Go Viral Marketing

So we all understand the concept of ‘going viral’, right’? Remember the “getting the flu” analogy? It all starts with one member of the family getting infected by a friend or a relative. He brings the virus home and pretty soon the entire family gets hit… but not before the ‘carrier’ passes it to others too!

Just like that, viral marketing is leveraging tools to drive traffic to your website and profits. A good way to go viral is with an eProduct. The ebook could be yours or someone elses. If allowed, you can place advertisements strategically in the back of an ebook (under Recommended Resources). These can be ebooks with resell rights (any form that allows the product to be easily passed to another – master resell rights, unrestricted PLR rights, rebranding rights or giveaway rights – more on these in a moment).

But how do your find the ‘carrier’? Obviously a suitable carrier could be a niche-targeted eProduct. Those like-minded individuals, who have a passion for the topic of the ebook, will ingest, and spread it, generating targeted traffic to your sales letter page. Some specific eProduct examples could be:

• Unrestricted PLR ebooks or special reports. The easier it is for people to get their hands on your book, the better the traffic! Do not worry about people altering your ads – people are usually too lazy to alter the book. They will promote your links for you! The most appealing thing about unrestricted PLR is that people can SELL the PLR rights to others making it highly valuable!

• E-books or special reports with Master resell rights. The same applies as unrestricted PLR. Resellers can resell your books, bundle your books together as a package or into a fire sale or offer them as a bonus. You can watch as your books (and your links) fall into the hands of readers all over the world!

• Products with giveaway rights. If you have excellent content, people are more than willing to give away your book to others and the virus spreads. Although it carries less perceived value compared to a ‘paid’ product, nevertheless, it still has it usefulness if your content is good.

You can create as many viral campaigns as you can for your website. Once they are all setup, all you need to do is tweak your sales pages or landing pages to maximize your profits. And who said viruses are bad for you????

Audience Engagement part 1

The key to maximizing your earnings is engaging your readers. Unlike traditional ads where you are paid for impressions or clicks, affiliates are only paid when/if a specific action is performed. The action might be a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, but regardless, you are not paid until you’ve compelled your readers to act.

With that in mind, here are the Top 5 attributes of an engaging affiliate marketing initiative:

1. Know Your Audience
The most successful way to use affiliate programs is to anticipate and meet the needs of your readers. Consider why they are coming to your site. What are you providing that they are looking for? Make sure the affiliate products you are promoting provide a solution to your audience’s problems.

If you are writing about sports, don’t put up affiliate ads for printer toner just because everyone has a printer and those programs have a high payout. The people who are coming to read commentary or get stats for their favorite teams aren’t thinking about those things when they’re on your site.

The more relevant the ads are to your readers, the more likely they will use them.

2. Be Trustworthy
Readers are savvy. They know an affiliate link when they see one. If you break their trust by promoting a product you don’t believe in or take advantage of their visit with too many ads, they will leave and never come back.

It is your repeat visitors that will drive traffic. They are the ones who will give you linkbacks, spread the word, and recommend your site as the go-to place for valuable content. You need to build a relationship based on genuine content.

If your visitors don’t think you’re being honest, they won’t read anything else you have to say.

3. Be Helpful
Think of affiliate ads as additional resources that complement your content. Give value to your content by making it helpful, useful, and informative.

Don’t put up a list of your favorite books, hoping people will click on the affiliate link, purchase the books (just because you listed them), so you can cash in on a sale. Take some time to write a detailed review, and use affiliate ads to point them in the right direction if they decide to act on your information. That’s what affiliate ads are for. If you write a great review recommending a book and readers buy the book because of it, you should get something for that.

But just throwing out links to products with no rhyme or reason will result in a quick exit by visitors.

4. Be Transparent
Always disclose your affiliations. Your readers will appreciate your honesty, and will feel better about contributing to your earnings. If they sense that you are being less than honest about your affiliations, they are savvy enough to bypass your link and go directly to the vendor just to avoid giving you referral credit.

Honesty and full disclosure is a necessary part to building a loyal reader base. They know they are supporting you by using your referral links. Make them happy and eager to do so.

5. Select Carefully
Take the time to go through all the different options for products or services available through the programs. Put some thought into which products or services your readers may need or like. Also, change the ads around often, try different ones, and use different graphics and text to see which are the most effective.

Hmm, there’s actually more to share here, but I’ll share more in a future post, soon – I promise………

Google Website Optimizer

The first time that I was exposed to this tool was when I was presenting at The System Seminar in 2008. On of my co-faculty members was Tom Leung from Google and he did a presentation on Google Website optimizer. This is a free tool offered by Google that allows you to do A/B split testing and multivariate testing in order to improve conversions. You can test any element on your landing page such as headlines, sub-headings, call to action, images and many other variable. He said something that has stuck with me every since I saw his presentation.

He said, “Bad landing pages are where clicks go to die.” Now if you are buying traffic and you are sending that traffic to bad landing pages, you are essentially paying for clicks that die. Not only is it important to test various ads you create to generate traffic to your CPA offers, it is equally important to test various elements on your landing pages in order to generate more CPA leads.

Although you have little control over the advertiser’s landing page on the CPA network if you are direct linking, you do have the ability to better pre-sell your prospects with your own landing page. To learn how to use Google Website Optimizer, I recommend going through their  website tutorials.

5 Affiliate Marketing Product Mistakes

Many affiliate marketers today are facing the problem of not knowing which particular affiliate products to promote because of the deluge of prodeucts available. Here are 5 mistakes to avoid

1. Focusing on the affiliate program not on the product

It is of vital importance for you to remember that you must market the product, and not the program. Therefore, don’t even for a second forget about the real product you’re selling, even though you might be inclined to dedicate yourself to competing with other well-performing affiliates. Affiliate

We are not saying that competition is not good, you need to stay competitive, but you must also be generous enough to share your information and make use of necessary resources such as certain links and blogs with other affiliates to generate sales not only by yourself, but together.

2. Failing to invest in viable means of advertising

Don’t use the wrong materials. In order to do this, pay attention to the response of your target market and you will definitely be able to tell which specific form of advertising is more appropriate for affiliate marketing. You should take a few steps: invest in well-made endorsements, banners, emails and links.

Some markets respond very well to any of these. However, you must make sure that every advertisement of yours is informative and has viable content that will confer your company’s credibility. This will eventually lead to increased sales from satisfied customers.

3. Ignoring the Search Engine Optimization Process

Ignoring SEO is a common mistake among affiliates. We must not fail to take into consideration that a good content is not necessarily the road to success, for a non-optimized site will never attract potential customers. A good search engine optimization gives you better visibility and if you apply the SEO techniques properly, you will have a more valuable site, with higher chances of attracting customers. Read also an article about Top Major Mistakes in the Search Engine Optimization Process

4. Focusing on the product not on the site

Focusing on the product is a good thing to do when you are trying to succeed in this business, but focusing only on the product, thus placing your site on the second place will bring you difficulties. Therefore, you should always bring something new to your site, improve it as much as you can, for the site will influence whether your product will sell or not.

If you want people to buy from you, then try a different approach from the other affiliates, be creative and innovative with your site. Keep in mind that the product is an added bonus to your customers.

5. Failing to keep up with latest news in the industry of your chosen products

Stay informed – in tune with the market, and stay ahead of the competition.

Pie In The Sky Claims?

A new year is among us. How will you fare in 2010? Will you be setting some Super Affiliate New Year Resolutions?Something to be careful about is this: Throughout the Affiliate Marketing landscape, no doubt you’ve come across a ton of reports, blog/forum posts and information products where the person has claimed to be making huge dollars as an affiliate, aka a super affiliate; leaving you green with envy.

Treat all such reports with a grain of salt; particularly if you’re an affiliate marketing newbie. Why?

Often, it’s just total lies – there’s really no other way to put it. It’s often just a hook to sucker you into whatever is being touted, or grooming you for purchasing a product in the future. Often sales pages for a product stating “let me show you how I make a thousand bucks a day from affiliate marketing” are owned by people who have bought the product and site from the guy who actually made the thousand dollars a day – mostly by selling the product and site. You’ll find tens of thousands of these get rich quick sites scattered throughout the Internet.

Don’t rely on scans of commission checks either as proof of income or revenue generated. These are easily falsified.

Consider there may be a large sum of money the person has outlaid in order to make that cash. For example, Dude A claims he made 100k, but what he doesn’t tell you is that he spent 60k to make it on promoting the product. Dude B makes 55k but only spent 5k. While Dude A might seem to be the high flyer, Dude B is the more successful affiliate when it comes down to it as his ROI (Return On Investment) is far higher.

Some affiliates aim for quality over quantity. It’s not uncommon in PPC (pay per click) for instance for some affiliate marketers to spend 7 bucks in clicks in order to make 10. That’s not really profitable unless you’re doing volume, and it’s this sort of approach that’s also helped to contribute to high PPC prices today.

Something else to bear in mind is time – two guys make a thousand bucks, one spends 40 hours to make it, another spends 20. The first guy crows about the thousand bucks, the second keeps quiet. I’d rather learn from the second person myself – but so many of these guys fly under the radar; which is really a smart thing to do when you think about it.

The other issue is that some of these self styled super affiliate have been in the game for a very long time. They’ve spent years honing their approaches – thousands upon thousands of dollars; and likely lost a lot of time and money in the process. This is pretty normal as part of the learning curve, regardless of how many “secret reports” you buy. Some of this information may shorten the process to profitability, but be prepared for the pathway to success to be a lengthy one.

Often what the super affiliates and marketing gurus who sell information products won’t tell you about is what some call the “inner circle strategy”. It works on the principle of networking with their affiliate buddies and wealth building on wealth. There’s big dollars to be made using it, but you need to be semi-successful as an affiliate first before you’ll get an opportunity to even get a foot in the door of these little clubs – learn more about the inner circle strategy.

The real secret

Most of the information you need to make a decent income from affiliate marketing can be found for free. Affiliate forums are also a great place to gain insight. While there are some high flying super affiliates out there who are highly successful in their own right and have the midas touch; remember all that glitters is not gold and sometimes the gold has to be mined using a lot of blood, sweat and tears – and that’s what you should be counting on as a newbie in the world of affiliate marketing. My approach has always been – think content before profit.

In any affiliate program, it’s the top couple of percent who generate the most sales – over 90% will make next to nothing. It’s very much like any other aspect of life where only a comparative few achieve excellence. In affiliate marketing, you just need to find a niche that gives you the best chance of being in that top couple of percent; so that’s where having a genuine passion in a given area can work to your advantage.

Love cars? Focus on that. Are you passionate about pets? Develop sites around your favorite pet breed; create original useful and informative content, build up a mailing list, keep in touch with your subscribers with RSS feeds and email newsletters; follow some basic social media and search engine optimization principles and the traffic will come. Then hook into the affiliate side of things; running offers relevant to your topic.

It is easy on the face of it, but there is an investment of time – but it’s a lot lower risk and very rewarding as you’ll be working in an area you actually care about. Once you have a handle on that, other forms of affiliate marketing will be a lot easier to generate from.

Money is important in life and business, but so is time – equally, if not more so; so ensure your time is being spent effectively and not being wasted soaking up spin from furus (fake gurus )

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