Category : Affiliate Marketing

2 Top Notch Affiliate Marketing Guides

January 28, 2013 by Ryan 2 Comments

I happened on a couple of resources today that everyone needs to grab, both newbies and seasoned veterans alike.

Both guides are on Shoemoney.com. They’re geared towards beginners, but after going through them, I think there’s something for everyone there. You never know when even the most casual guide will have a little gem that sparks something you hadn’t thought of.

Internet Marketing Guide

The first guide is focused on Internet Marketing. It covers setting up a site, including figuring out what type of site you want to create, how to monetize your website, getting traffic, and even tools to make your efforts more successful.

Check out the guide here: Shoemoney Tools Beginners Guide.

Local Affiliate Marketing Guide

The second guide is geared towards Local Affiliate Marketing. Shoemoney refers to it as “shooting fish in a barrel” with local businesses lining up to pay for help promoting their businesses. The guide covers all areas of getting started with local affiliate marketing from identifying your services to how to market yourself and deal with the common client questions and concerns.

Grab the guide from this link: Shoemoney Tools Local Affiliate Marketing Guide.

While you’re over at Shoemoney.com, check out his blog and other resources he has available. Some good content there.

How To Use SEMRush To Refine Your Blog Targeting Plan

January 25, 2013 by Ryan 2 Comments

SEMRush just keeps getting cooler and cooler. They continue to pack new features into the tool, refine the interface, and increase the value of their product. It’d been a while since I had logged in to check the tool out. When SEMRush gave me a temporary account to check out things out, I was pretty surprised at how much had changed in the short time I was away. If you aren’t using SEMRush, I’m going to tell you up front you need to take a look at it.

One thing I’ve been working on the last few months (actually longer than that, but I don’t really want to fully admit it) is a redesign of Blueverse.com. Part of the redesign is taking a fresh look at what the blog is focused on, and the keywords/keyphrases I want to target.

So about 2 months ago, I sat down and spent a couple of hours going through my site’s stats. I looked at a number of different things in depth, one of which was what the site was already ranking well for. It’s a great exercise to do, and I encourage everyone to do it. Except, don’t do what I did…

Today I realized that my hours worth of work could have been shaved down to a few minutes thanks to SEMRush.

What’s the process for accomplishing this in SEMRush? Well, it’s mighty simple:

Log in to your account.
Enter your domain name in the top Search bar.
Click Search.

Yep. That’s it. You’ll be presented with a nice dashboard showing you all sorts of valuable information. For this project, I focused on the Positions tab under Organic Research on the left hand column. I wanted to know what the site has been ranking well for and what positions it was in for which keywords/keyphrases.

What I found in SEMRush matched up pretty closely to what my Google Analytics stats indicate. I was pretty surprised to see Blueverse.com ranking for several keyphrases not related at all to my target.

What’s more, in SEMRush, you also get some handy add’l tools GA doesn’t show you. Here are a few of the ones I found useful:

Search Engine Traffic price (the estimated cost of purchasing the Search Engine Traffic SEMRush reports for your domain
CPC (Cost Per Click) estimates for the various keywords/keyphrases you’re ranking for
Trend graphs for each result giving you a sense of how the trends for that keyword/keyphrase look over the length of a 12 month period
Total number of results for each entry, which helps you determine the competitiveness of a keyphrase

This tool alone can save you loads of time for your existing sites. However, an additional benefit of having this at your disposal is using it for sites or blogs you’re considering purchasing. You can plug a site you want to buy into the search tool and quickly see how it’s ranking and for what terms. That can easily help you weed out the garbage site from the diamond in the rough.

We’re just scratching the surface of what their service can do for you, your sites and your marketing efforts. I’m getting back into the tool and have a number of things I’ll be trying and reporting on.

Take a look at SEMRush today. Here’s a link to their site: SEMRush.com. (NOT an affiliate link)

A big THANKS to SEMRush for the temp Pro account to check out what you guys have been up to!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Make Money Blogging Tagged With: Make Money Blogging, SEMRush

AdWords PPC Features that Can Make or Break Your Campaign

January 17, 2013 by Ryan 8 Comments

Just like many other things in online marketing, there are certain features in AdWords pay per click management that are both Yin and Yang. When used correctly, these features can boost your campaign, but if not, they can actually disrupt the flow of your campaign.

So, what are these PPC double-edged swords? Read on and find out.

Shared Budgets

Budget allocation for PPC advertising services can be quite tricky and tedious, especially for big scale campaigns. Shared Budgets is actually a feature that is meant to somewhat streamline this process by allowing multiple campaigns to share a single budget. From a logistical pay per click management point of view, this is a relief.

However, what can be dangerous is that since ad spend is based on a first come first served basis, your high performing campaigns may suffer simply because the keywords or search terms included in your less performing campaigns have already eaten up this shared budget.

If you do decide to utilize this feature, make sure that the campaigns are almost similar in nature. Do not allow high search volume keywords eat into low search volume but high converting search terms. The key to making this feature work in your favor is the constant monitoring of ad spends.

Click to Call

If you haven’t heard that there are now more smartphones than toothbrushes in the planet then you are not closely paying attention to the recent trends in mobile marketing. Now, mobile advertisers can actually include a number in their PPC ads which mobile searchers can click on and automatically triggers a call.

So, what’s the downside here? Actually, there’s none and the only negative thing about this feature is not knowing about it and not using it to your advantage. Data from Google reveals that 94% of mobile browsers respond to ads by calling. To start making this feature work to your advantage, look into your pay per click management data and look at the keywords or search terms from mobile traffic. Remembers, searchers behave differently when using a mobile device versus a desktop device and for proper resource allocation, you should focus more on mobile search terms for this execution.

Shared Negative Keywords

Just like in Shared Budgets, PPC advertising services managers can now expedite the process of setting negative keywords by creating lists that campaigns will share. You can now skip the dubious task of uploading the same negative keywords again and again.

However, the danger lies when marketers make changes to the campaigns, but not to the negative keywords. A keyword strategy can oftentimes be volatile and the low performing keywords of the past maybe the high performing keywords tomorrow. Blame it on sheer forgetfulness – or maybe carelessness – that you were not able to remove negative keywords that are preventing your ads to show up given your newly revamped keyword strategy.

Effective pay per click management is by and large founded on good monitoring. To avoid this mistake, do a negative keywords audit regularly to make sure that every bit of information is directed towards achieving the same PPC objectives.

This guest post was written by Richard Franklin. Richard is an Internet marketing expert and wants to share his knowledge with people who are about to hire a PPC marketing company for their business. He has also given words to many articles where one can find the latest trends popular in search engine marketing company.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing Tagged With: Google Adwords, PPC

You’re Getting Screwed By Your CPA Network(s)

January 16, 2013 by Ryan Leave a Comment

I had another post I was going to work on today, but came across a recent post on Shoemoney.com that made me stop and think hard about the affiliate offers I’m running and affiliate marketing in general.

Shoemoney.com is one of those blogs I’ve followed for a long time. Lots of what he posts is just useless ramblings and how he all pissed off at this person or that. There are plenty of times I ask myself why I still take the time to read it.

Shoe doesn’t care. He’s upfront he writes what’s on his mind, and that’s that.

Well today is one of those days I’m reminded why he’s worth reading. You get a gem like this that makes you think and potentially becomes the catalyst for change.

The post is titled Yeap, (Most) CPA Networks are Raping You.

It details Shoe’s experience with CPA Networks and how they’re either shaving leads off what you bring in, or are giving you a significant amount less than they’re getting paid for each lead by the advertiser. Or in some cases doing both things.

Pocketing a sizable portion of the payout I don’t really have a problem with. I consider that markup as a middleman. You can charge whatever you like for your product, and brokering the CPA offer is their “product” in this case.

The one I take issue with, though, is shaving valid leads I bring to the table. That’s literally STEALING from me as an affiliate. In the examples in Shoe’s post, he shows how he was losing nearly 50% from lead shaving in one case, and nearly 10% in the other. Drive a decent amount of traffic to a $10 offer, for instance, and you’ve got some serious cash not making it into your pocket.

I encourage you to take a look at his post. It will take less than 10 minutes, and be an eye opener for those of you who haven’t been doing affiliate marketing for long. I’ve been doing it for a few years, and knew it happened, but was avoiding dealing with it. This reminder has prompted me to take some extra steps to not be a victim of this. It’s just plain not right.

Read the Shoemoney.com post here: Yeap, (Most) CPA Networks are Raping You.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing, Make Money Blogging Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, CPA Networks

Tips For Researching Affiliate Niches

January 15, 2013 by Ryan 4 Comments

Whether you’re a new affiliate marketing, or a seasoned veteran, finding and researching niche ideas can be a challenge.

When you’re new, it’s daunting to try and tackle the whole niche selection process. Your tendency is to follow the herd which means you’re competing with the best of the best. It’s also challenging to pick one niche, focus in and nail it. We all want instant results, so newbies tend to jump to new niches too quickly without giving an identified one a chance to really succeed.

For the seasoned veteran, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut, making it more challenging to branch out to new niches and traffic sources.

I bookmarked a post by a guy named Paul who’s been around the affiliate marketing block a time or two. For a long time, he posted regularly on UberAffiliate.com, but has laid off posting on the block last year. However, his content is really good.

When I came back across this post, I found it mirrors what I’ve been doing in a general sense as of late. Here are 4 key ways to find offers:

Get out and visit some sites. Do some field work. One of the best things you can do when looking for offers, ideas, etc. is to just look at what’s running on popular sites.
Do some competitive intelligence. There have been some vast improvements in seeing what ads run where over the past few years. It absolutely levels the playing field for those who want to use the data and learn to manage the tools correctly. Paul, who wrote the article I link to below, loves WhatRunsWhere.com. I personally like AdBeat. Find something and use it. Have it make you more money!
Watch the trends. This is made ultra easy using a tool like Google Alerts, which I posted about a couple of days ago here: How To Get All The Free Post Ideas You Could Ever Want. Watch what happens, and brainstorm ideas for niches you can market to. The best thing you can do is create your own ideas. Find a trend and ride that puppy!
Talk to your Account Manager (AM). Strike up a relationship with your AM at your favorite network and hit them up for offers to promote, new traffic sources and just general ideas. Just a few weeks ago, I hit up my AM who connected me with a key person in the network that gave me some great great tips. Stuff that is helping me make more money, and things I wouldn’t have thought about.

The last thing that’s critical to your success is taking action. Do something…ANYTHING! Even if you think it may be the wrong thing. At least you’ll be taking action.

Here’s a link to the blog post: Researching Affiliate Niches. It’s worth a read with more ideas and expanding on what I have above.

Now get out there and mix it up!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, niche selection

Make More Money TODAY By Split Testing

January 14, 2013 by Ryan 2 Comments

I mentioned Neil Patel’s blog, QuickSprout.com, the other day (link…..). Normally I wouldn’t be so quick to link back to it so quickly. I like to spread the love a little bit.

But Neil just added a great post titled 11 Obvious A/B Tests You Should Try.

A/B Split Testing is something we should all be doing, for just about anything marketing related, but something most people don’t do because it can be a pain in the butt. Especially when you don’t have a system in place to track your testing, and determine which results show improvement to ultimately make you more money.

The reality is, though, we should be split testing everything we possible can. If you want to maximize what you’re making from your efforts that is.

I found several of his results to be pretty amazing. Here are a few you can read more about in the full post on QuickSprout.com:

Changing a button color increased click through rates by 21%
Offering a “Free Trial” versus a “Money Back Guarantee” boosted signups by 116%
Removing one form field increased conversion rate by 25%
Adding the word FREE in ads reduced CPA from $60 to $43 (a 30%ish savings)

Those are just a few that made me go “Wow!”.

The list provides lots of specific things for you to try, however more importantly, it will spark some creativity you can use for your own A/B split testing. You literally should be testing EVERYTHING. Even the smallest change can produce results. Think about it. A 25% increase in conversions can represent 25% more money in your pocket. It can be the difference between making $1000 in a month and $1250 for that same month. Or $5k a month instead of just $4k. That can really start to add up.

So head over to QucikSprout.com and check that post out here: 11 Obvious A/B Tests You Should Try.

Thanks Neil!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing Tagged With: A/B Testing, Split Testing

Part 2: 2 Tools Every Blogger, Internet Marketer & Business Person Should Be Using TODAY

January 11, 2013 by Ryan 3 Comments

Evernote graphic Yesterday I covered one of my favorite tools I use on a daily basis to manage my files, business documents, and just about everything digital for my online and offline businesses. Check it out here if you missed it: 2 Tools Every Blogger, Internet Marketer & Business Person Should Be Using TODAY – Part 1.

Today, I want to cover the second tool I couldn’t live without: Evernote.

While I use Dropbox to manage and store most of my files, Evernote has become an indispensable tool for managing notes, reference images, thoughts, links, etc. I use Evernote for everything. Although I keep a notepad on my desk at all times to jot down notes, anything I plan on keeping for longer than a day goes into Evernote.

What’s more, Evernote is also now my tool of choice for client meetings, note taking at conferences, brainstorming sessions, etc. I really don’t know how I’d live without it. I even set up a group notebook for my employees in one of my offline businesses to track client information and business documents we use regularly.

Looking through my Evernote notebooks, here are some things I use it for:

Client meeting notes
Conference, webinar and other training notes
Business reference documents (one cool thing about Evernote is you can add images, Word and Excel docs, etc right to the notes as attachments…VERY COOL!)
Affiliate Marketing campaign ideas and test results
Collaboration documents for projects I’m working on with other partners and contractors
Running list of ideas for projects, blogs, sites, etc.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve also added things like contact info for various people, and an archive of recent screen grabs (I use Skitch for all my screen shots, which automatically adds those to Evernote).

To enhance Evernote even further, pick up a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner (here’s the one I use: Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i Scanner). It’s not cheap, but worth every penny.

The ScanSnap can upload scans directly into your Evernote account if you want. When you hit the scan button, a window will pop up once scanning is complete asking where you want to store the document you just scanned. Click the Evernote icon and you’re done. It’s THAT easy!

The latest integration with Evernote is the specially designed Evernote Moleskine notebook. I love Moleskine notebooks, and they have released a special Evernote edition that will let you take a picture of anything you’ve put in the specially design Moleskine and import it directly into Evernote. Evernote will then turn your written words into searchable text. I’m still playing around with it, but it seems to be a perfect compliment of paper and digital.

Bottom line, you owe it to yourself to embrace Evernote. No matter what you do for a living, or what you have to keep track of, Evernote can help you do it better!

Check out Evernote here: Evernote.com.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing, Make Money Blogging Tagged With: Evernote

2 Tools Every Blogger, Internet Marketer & Business Person Should Be Using TODAY – Part 1

January 10, 2013 by Ryan 3 Comments

I’m a gadget freak. I love trying new things, testing out software, electronics, devices, etc. I’m definitely an early adopter and don’t really think twice about paying a premium to have the latest and greatest. I know, it’s a waste of money and some would argue a character flaw. I’ve just chosen to embrace it, and learn to live with my gadgetry addiction.

That said, there are some tools that I find absolutely indispensable. They have become part of every work day and a good portion of my online as well as offline work revolves around them. Today I’m going to cover the first of these 2 tools. I’m splitting them up into separate posts because I feel both are that important and I don’t want them to get lost in a longer post.

The first tool I firmly believe EVERY blogger, Internet Marketer, Affiliate Marketer, Businesswoman, Businessman, etc. should be using is Dropbox. You might be thinking, “DUH!” But I’m surprised by the number of people who don’t know about Dropbox, and those who know, but haven’t yet embraced this useful tool.

Dropbox, in a nutshell, is a hard drive in the sky. You can use it without downloading any applications to your desktop, but the functionality is much more useful if you use the Dropbox application. A few things I absolutely love about Dropbox:

Files are available literally anywhere you have an Internet connection. This includes from mobile devices like an iPad, iPhone, Android device, etc.
You have an offline option on all devices and your computer so your files are with you and available even when you don’t have an Internet connection.
A web portal allows you to get to your files even if you don’t have one of your connected devices. Sit down at any computer with an Internet connection and you can access your stuff.
Files are transmitted through a secure connection and stored securely.
Free storage is more than sufficient for most uses…saving you some hard earned cashola.
Easy sharing with others makes this tool that much handier!

I could go on, but you get the idea. Just in the last 2 weeks I’ve used Dropbox to:

Share files with a colleague for a membership site we launched.
Back up and store pretty much all of my working files for various projects and sites.
Access a spreadsheet in a pinch I didn’t have with me, but easily got to through my iPad while sitting in a meeting with a partner.
Send some important documents to my accountant for end of year tax stuff.

Those are just a few off the top of my head. Although I don’t use Dropbox for anything sensitive (personal information, passwords, sensitive client/partner documents, etc), I use it for about 90% of what passes through my digital hands. I’m getting to a point where setting up a new computer is becoming trivial because much of my world is now in the cloud, so to speak. Very handy…especially as I travel more and become more location non-dependent.

The Dropbox application stores a copy of your files on your local hard drive, so if you’re using a laptop, your files will always be with you. If you have an iPad or iPhone and want to take your files with you,

A couple of things you need to know how to do to make the most of Dropbox:

Share a document or folder

Log into your Dropbox account on Dropbox.com
Simply right click on the file or folder you want to share and either choose Invite to folder (more permanent access to the folder and it’s contents), or choose Share link (a link to the file or folder to download it.
Enter the person’s email address you want to share with, or use a contact already on your system which Dropbox can import.
That’s pretty much it.

View files offline on your iPad

Open the Dropbox app on your iPad.
Navigate to the document or file you want to have available offline.
Click the Favorite icon (the star) in the upper right hand corner.
Your document or file will now be available even if you don’t have an Internet connection.

One other thing I really like about Dropbox is it keeps old versions of files on their servers for a period of time. If you accidentally delete a file, you can go back and retrieve it.

Try out Dropbox today. If you sign up with the following link, you’ll get 500MB of additional space with a new account: Sign Up For Dropbox.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing, Blogging Tagged With: blogging tools, Dropbox

3 Steps To More Sales By Split Testing

January 7, 2013 by Ryan 2 Comments

Take a look at that last promotion you sent. Go ahead, open it up.

How is your subject? Interesting enough to open? How about your call to action? So intriguing that you want to click it?

Good! But opens and clicks only measure interest. They’re not your end goal.

Your goal is to make sales. It’s the revenue from customer purchases that keeps you afloat. So a broadcast’s true worth can be measured in the sales it generates.

The trick is finding out how to put the message together in a way that prompts the most purchases. With a little setup, you can do this right in your AWeber account.

STEP 1: Set Up Sales Tracking

First, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking the purchases subscribers are making in response to each broadcast.

You can do this with sales tracking. If you’ve already set this up, skip to step 2. If you haven’t yet, head over to the Aweber Knowledge Base and follow these steps.

Once you’re ready, it’s time for…

STEP 2: Tweak Your Promotional Broadcast

Start with your original broadcast design. The goal is to see if a different version will sell more, so you’ll need to create that other version.

To get started, take a look at:

Your call to action. Is your design eye-catching enough? Would different words be more compelling? Should it move above the fold (the point where readers need to scroll to see more)?
Your text-to-image ratio. Experts recommend a blend of 60% text to 40% images to illustrate your message while avoiding spam traps.
Your preheader. Do you have a whitelisting request? A link to your newsletter online? An unsubscribe link?
Your format. Are you using the best layout for your content? Or should you try a different layout instead?
Your images and copy. Are you presenting your product or service in the best possible light? Or would your readers respond better to something else?

STEP 3: Split Test For the Winning Design

To figure out which design will generate more sales, use the broadcast split testing feature in your account. This sends each version to a randomly selected, equally sized audience so you’ll get the most accurate results.

After the broadcasts go out, follow the QuickStats for each version to keep track of sales. (Just click on the subject on the Broadcast page to see how they’re doing.)

Once you have the winning version, you know what design to use for future promotions!

How Likely Are You to Follow These Steps?

Does setting up sales tracking and a split test sound like something you’re likely to do?

If it does, what changes do you think you’ll test? We’d love to hear about your results!

If not, what’s standing in your way?

This guest post was reprinted courtesy of Aweber. THE BEST email marketing and campaign system on the market today.

If you don’t already have an Aweber account, sign up for a risk free trial here: Aweber Trial.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, Split Testing