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 )

Super Affiliate New Year Resolutions

When the new year arrives, many people will be making resolutions about getting in better shape, going back to school, starting a new career (I hear affiliate marketing is great!), finding that special someone, or a variety of other self-improvement goals for 2010. What goals can affiliates set?

First and foremost, affiliates should be thinking about testing a variety of resolution related offers in the weeks ahead. But, what kind of resolutions can affiliates make? Here are a handful of ideas to kick your New Year off with some goals to help grow your business.

Test new offers early and often in 2010. Don’t sit around until your top performing offer starts to fall off and then look for something new to promote. Be proactive and come up with a plan that allows you to constantly test new offers.

Stay on top of all your affiliate managers. Don’t wait for them to reach out to you with recommendations on new hot offers. Hit them up for new ideas and offers that will work for your audience.

Attend at least one industry conference this year. Whether you make the trek to Vegas for Affiliate Summit, the East Coast for LeadsCon or some other locale for ad:tech, be sure to attend one big industry event in 2010. This especially goes for those affiliates who have never checked out a show before. Find out what you have been missing.

Monitor and analyze your campaign performance more closely than ever before. It’s amazing how many marketers start running a campaign and then don’t monitor it regularly. Even if you are already keeping regular tabs on everything you run, find ways to dig deeper into the numbers. Check results by day of the week, time of the day, geography, or other variable. Then use that data to optimize your programs.

Keep up to date on what’s going on in the industry. Whether that means reading a number of quality blogs or newsletters each day or sitting in on some good conference sessions, do what it takes to stay informed.

Bring on the new year!!

British Airways Fare Sale!

My job has me traveling to different marketing events, be it for Social Media or the SEM/SEO verticals. Last month, it was San Diego, CA. Last week, Las Vegas, NV. I might need to go to Austin, TX before years end. I flew to London some months ago for SES, which BTW is coming up again: February 16-19, 2010. I enjoyed London – well, except for the cold – but I definitely would not mind going again. Which brings me to British Airways.

For all you travel gurus, British Airways has a super ‘World Sale’ going on, good through November 19th. If I book now for the SES conference in London, flying from Orlando to London is only $289 each way that week – NOT BAD!!!!! And it’s not just London that’s on sale but Asia, the Middle East and Africa too!

My recent travels reminded me how the economy has affected even the airlines – the only complimentary offerings the airlines provided during my recent flights was something to drink (which consisted of either water or juice or soda). Anything else is extra.

What’s cool about British Airways is that they provide you an “upgraded” experience: 200+ On-Demand Entertainment Options, ergonomically designed seats (complete with lumbar support, adjustable headrest and recline ), eyeshades, flight socks and of course complimentary food and cocktails on all flights. Yeah!

Too bad I can’t fly them to Texas…

Just Got Back From Pubcon

Last week I was away in Las Vegas, manning a booth for our illustrious ‘Sponsored Conversation’ marketing company. Had a great time. Saw some old friends, made new ones, had some delicious enchiladas at the Hard Rock Hotel (Pink Taco restaurant) and got to see some sites – well, we walked down the strip (shrug).

The show was smaller than expected, way smaller than the DMA tradeshow from a few weeks earlier in San Diego, but my colleague and I got to meet some great people in the SEM/SEO space and hopefully garner some lasting business relationships with them.

I met some key Super Affiliate Marketers as well which will help define the path this blog will be following in 2010. Stay tuned for details…

New FTC Mandated Disclosure Rules

This past Monday, the Federal Trade Commission made some big changes to its rules on endorsements and testimonials in advertising. It’s the 1st time in 29 years that the FTC has changed them, but it’s a project they’ve been cooking up for a while now. The reason? The Social Media landscape. The agency, charged with protecting consumer interests, has decided to update its policy on endorsements because the Internet has become a compelling medium in shaping consumer decisions. “In 1980 most of all advertising was disseminated by the advertisers themselves; today a good part of that advertising is being disseminated by users,” said Richard Cleland, assistant director- division of advertising practices at the FTC.

The main takeaway is that commercial relationships need to be disclosed, although they did not say how. For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of free-flow giveaways may be over. Gadget bloggers and reviewers on Amazon and such now must disclose freebies and financial interests or face fines up to $11,000 per incident.

What does this mean for affiliates? Affiliate-created blogs, review sites and other pages have proliferated, filled with claims that drive traffic to merchants. However, when this content contains exaggerated claims or fails to disclose connections with sellers, there may be liability for deceptive advertising.

Still, the new rules are fairly ambiguous, but what’s exciting about this is that the social media marketing company I work for (full disclosure, I am not being compensated for this post ) IZEA Inc., has been advocating disclosure for years, and to quote Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA, the company has “spent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars building the marketplaces and tools to make social media marketing easy, effective and FTC compliant.”

Go us!!!

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