Archive for Affiliate Marketing
Offering an Affiliate Program to Increase Sales
Posted by: | CommentsI’m about to set up an affiliate program using the Affiliate Platform plugin for WordPress. I figure it will help to market my online guitar lessons and people will be motivated to help sell my products and services. The way an affiliate program works is people can sign up at your site and then when people buy your products through their affiliate links, the plugin tracks who the referrer was and will give them credit.
I looked at sites like e-junkie (monthly fee) and payloadz (fee per transaction) but I figure a one time payment for a WordPress plugin would be cheaper in the long run. I combine this with the free e-shop plugin for WordPress.
The sales are tracked through affliate links (ie yoursite.com/yoursalespage?affid=myaffiliateguy) where ‘myaffiliateguy’ would be the id of one of your affiliates. Then when they make sales for you, you can pay them via the admin panel often via paypal, so no admin nightmares of mailing out cheques each month.
If you have a wordpress site (you do, don’t you?) and products/services to sell, then you might want to consider using the Affiliate Platform plugin for WordPress. Even if you don’t sell products you can use it as a lead generation system (tracking leads through a contact form on your site).
Better Tracking of Your Affiliate Sales Efforts
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been selling affiliate products for a few years now as well as my own products. If you sell affiliate products as well, you know that you probably should be testing and tracking more than you do. If you get a sale do you know which of your links got the sale and on what specific page?
We know we should create a specific link for every page, video, social network but we often don’t do it. So we don’t know which links are producing better results so we can do more of that. I recently reached out to some of the affiliate managers and they were quite helpful.
Link Tracking
With the ShareASale affiliate network you can add a special parameter to your link namely afftrack=xxx. So instead of using the same link all over the place you might put afftrack=youtube for a link in your youtube video (or more specifically the exact video if you have more than one). Or for a blog post afftrack=blogTop10TwitterTools.
Deep Linking
Another thing many of us don’t do is link to a specific page on the product website. Many of us send people to the order now page or the home page, making it difficult for people to find the product at times or coming off as too salesy. Why not send them to a content rich page? Many times we don’t have this link or we waste time looking for a specific link that’s been created for us. With the ShareASale affiliate network you can pick any page you want at the vendor site (a blog post for example) then create your own custom link. That way you can send people to those pages from your social networks and not come across as spammy. The way this works is through cookies being stored on the users machine, even though they don’t go right to the order page, the cookie tracks the sites domain so you are credited for the eventual sale.
The amazing thing is that you could even link to a site totally separate from the product website, create your own custom link and as long as the person finds the product page (through that separate website link) you will be credited for the sale! So you could create a custom link to a youtube video if the video description has a link to the product page (so that the user can hopefully click it and buy). Of course this is a more indirect method. You would want to test both sending them direct to buy page (so no distractions) or to less sales-oriented pages.
Get Traffic and Make Money Online
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’ve visited some of the links I’ve posted from Jeff Johnson’s blog on internet and affiliate marketing you know that he knows what he’s talking about. He’s managed to make a lot of money as a super-affiliate as well as selling his own information products (internet marketing is itself a huge and profitable market once you’ve been able to make money online).
You can check out his new get traffic and make money training program which has just launched as we speak.
Making Your First Dollar Online
Posted by: | CommentsI can’t think of any better way to learn everything there is to know about internet marketing (for free) than to go through Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge. You also get to take lots of action as you work through your favorite niche. I’ve been doing internet marketing and learning a ton about it over the years, but still managed to find great nuggets in that challenge.
Some of the key points are:
- Make Your First Dollar – You can’t make a million dollars without making a dollar first. If you can make a dollar then you can scale up these efforts to make more money
- Understand Your Market – you can learn a lot about your market using free tools like Google Reader to pull in articles, videos, blogs about your market niche
- Find a product that sells – before expanding too far into content creation make sure your product sells (or find a converting affiliate offer).I wouldn’t create my own product until I can sell a large quantity of someone else’s product.
- Dominate Your Market – become a market leader by understanding the market and adding to the conversation. Add videos, articles, blog posts to your market niche. In other words, add value
So go make that first dollar online! And let me know how it’s going.
How to Get Recurring Revenue
Posted by: | CommentsA hot trend these days for internet entrepreneurs is to sell access to their membership site or continuity program. The reason for this is the owner gets recurring revenue which is the holy grail of sales which attempts to get repeat customers. Rather than try to keep selling your customers a variety of products, it can be easier to sell them a membership to a members-only area with awesome and fresh content added regularly. Not to mention the interactive community aspect which is often achieved via forums.
On the affiliate side of things (if you don’t wish to create your own membership site), it’s also beneficial to sell a product that will get you perpetual payouts. Many of these entrepreneurs offer affiliate programs for their membership sites, so that you will get recurring revenue as long as your referral stays a member. You can go to sites like Clickbank to find products that are recurring by going to the Clickbank Marketplace and selecting ‘Recurring Billing’ under ‘Product Type’ along with your category of choice for your specific niche. You might want to verify that they will pay you indefinitely. There are sites out there that only pay a one time fee even for memberships – such as Guitar Tricks.
Jeff Johnson has a cool new (and free) video on the benefits of perpetual payouts that you should check out. You should also join his mailing list as you can get free seo software and traffic getting tutorials. He pumps out some really great content.
The Importance of Getting Traffic to Your Website
Posted by: | CommentsMost of us appreciate the need to get traffic to our websites but this important factor is often lost on newbies when they aren’t making sales. In many cases the lack of results, when it comes to online sales for well-converting products is due to low traffic. It might take 100-200 visits to a sales page before you get a sale so many times this amount of traffic has not been obtained.
I don’t know about you but when I see blog posts about how someone made $70,000 in 7 days it is not only NOT motivational, it also makes me angry (serenity now!). What they don’t usually tell you is all the up front preparation that went into getting those sales, in other words, the pre-launch efforts. And for many of the gurus they have huge email lists and larger than life reputations and usually many joint venture partners and affliliates. So in other words there are getting large highly-targeted traffic to their offers. The other issue is that making money is not usually a big bang approach but a daily and consistent effort over time. Having said that I am happy for people who are able to achieve this level of success.
Of course you need a purpose before you get traffic. Are you trying to get opt-ins to your email list? Are you trying to sell something? Are you trying to send traffic to another of your websites or pages? Once you set up this page for its specific purpose you then should work to get traffic to it.
You also want qualified traffic. This is traffic that is interested in your niche. If you have a guitar lesson blog but you get people who are looking for guitars then this is not qualified traffic. You want to make sure the keyword phrases for your niche are in your content. Try using less competitive keywords as well. Trying to compete with ‘guitar lessons’ for example may be almost impossible for most of us.
It’s also great to get repeat traffic because it often takes many repeat visits for people to buy. This traffic usually comes from those in your email list, those that have subscribed to your blog posts, those that subscribe to you Youtube channel, or those in your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc). Search engine traffic is most likely people that are new to your website. So you want to capture them either via email, subscribing to your blog, or following you on Twitter, Facebook and so on.