I just heard about the new Shopzilla affiliate program from Affiliate Manager, David Weinrot. Sounds like a compelling offer: a CPC model where affiliates earn a percentage (60%) of the revenue that is generated from the traffic they direct to Shopzilla.com.
I joined the Shopzilla affiliate program to get a closer look.
One thing that struck [...]
Joint ventures are business partnerships between two or more parties, usually limited to a single project. Such ventures enable the parties involved to make more money on the project than they could if they pursued that project alone.
Larger-scale ventures of this sort have at times led to mergers among corporations. But you’re just trying to run an affiliate marketing business; not be Donald Trump (at least not yet).
How can joint ventures work for you? Here are two examples:
Got Pancake Batter But No Stove?
Say you’ve found a product within your particular niche that you believe will sell like hotcakes. You’ve joined the merchant’s affiliate program, and you’ve prepared the marketing content to sell the product. Simply add a decent opt-in list and/or a high-traffic website, and turn the crank, right?
Well, what if you haven’t yet built up that opt-in list? Or, what if you just launched your website and haven’t yet attracted significant traffic? Both of these require that you take time to build trust in your target audience through your content, so that they will want more content from you. Without that well-developed target audience, those hotcakes will chill on the griddle.
Another affiliate, whose niche is related to yours, has the opt-in list or high-traffic website that you need. Hence, the joint venture: You give that person a percentage of your commission from product sales in exchange for marketing the product through his/her resources. Plus, a product recommendation from that affiliate can be very effective in selling the product to the affiliate’s target audience.
Well Run Dry?
A joint venture can also help resuscitate a resource that has run dry. Say you have a sizable opt-in list. But the revenue stream from that list is more like an arroyo, dry and lifeless. You may also lack time to produce the newsletters and other revenue-generating content for that list.
A joint venture with an expert both in writing and in your niche can help. Your partner writes content to your opt-in list. In return, he/she receives a percentage of your product sale commissions that his/her content generates. That opt-in list that was lying dormant is now producing for you again.
These examples show how entering into a joint venture can make more money for you than you would as a “lone wolf.” My next post will focus on what you need to enter into and maintain a joint venture.
GreasyPalm.co.uk, one of the UK’s largest consumer rewards websites, has announced the launch of their white label cashback services.
The white label of GreasyPalm will allow sites to offer their own branded cashback shopping service where members can earn cash rewards from over 850 participating retailers.
“We’re very pleased to offer white label partnerships out [...]
How can I monitor my affiliates who are using e-mail to be sure they are being CAN-SPAM compliant?
I’ve got two tools I’d recommend that you check out. First is LashBack.com, where they have a suite of tools to enable advertisers to monitor affiliate CAN-SPAM Act compliance.
Also, there is UnsubCentral.com, which enables you to manage your [...]
Has your traffic or conversion ratio changed dramatically? Many would look carefully if one or the other dropped. But, if it rises sharply, you should be equally interested to investigate. You want to know what you did wrong or right, so you can determine what works or what doesn’t.
The first step is to see whether you dropped off the SERPS. If you’re not there, people can’t find you (that way at least).
Next, try to correlate changes in traffic or conversions with any changes made to the site. But keep in mind there’s a time lag involved. You may make a change that isn’t indexed by the search engines for days, or weeks, sometimes longer.
It’s always tough to determine cause and effect when they’re far separated in time. (Ever wonder how humans first figured out what causes pregnancy?) The way to overcome that problem is to keep good data. Keep a detailed change log, and graphs of traffic and conversions. Then you can look for patterns and shift one graph backwards or forwards in time.
(That’s how scientists attempt to identify causes of climate change, for example. It takes decades for temperature changes in the atmosphere to affect the water dozens of meters deep. The time lag gives them useful information — a so-called ‘memory’ of changes.)
The specific changes to look for are usually obvious. Have you started (or ended) a new email campaign that (you hope) drives visitors to the site? Have you changed the look or navigation? Have you changed hosting companies? (That might affect page load speeds or percentage of successful connects.)
Run sample search queries that common sense tells you potential customers seeking you out would. Examine the results. Could you find you? Once you went to the site, do you find what the query result would lead you to suspect? I.e. is what’s on the page relevant to what you were looking for?
Is it attractive and interesting? Would you buy from yourself? A well-known Hollywood casting director once asked an audience of acting hopefuls at a seminar: Would you pay $8 to see you on the screen? Be honest with yourself.
As stage two of your research, you can check more technical measures, like: referring keywords, entry pages, and index counts, etc.
Sometimes the answers will pop out right away; other times, it requires a bit of digging and creative analysis. But the cause-effect relationship is always there. Sometimes the answer is unpleasant. Your potential customers may not be reacting to the changes you made as you’d hoped. But satisfying the market is what selling is all about. Good news or bad, it’s always better to know why.
The latest episode of Affiliate Thing features an interview with Wade Tonkin, founder of Christian Affiliate Marketers and Shmuly Tennenhaus, recently nominated Most Eligible Hassidic Bachelor at Shmais.com and a former affiliate manager for Ice.com.
The topic for the show was the role of faith, or a lack of it, in affiliate marketing.
I also touched [...]
There was a report from Reuters today that DoubleClick is exploring a sale and they are in talks with Microsoft (MSFT), and other potential buyers.
Being that Performics is a division of DoubleClick, the company could potentially be a Bill Gates property in the future.
If this were to happen, it could have a significant impact on [...]
There is an updated release of MarketingSherpa’s E-commerce Benchmark Guide with lots of helpful information for affiliate managers.
This new MarketingSherpa guide covers a number of areas, such as raising shopper-to-buyer conversions, lowering shopping cart abandons, and improving search engine marketing ROI.
Also, there are 223 charts & tables, 1,913 ecommerce marketer’s data, survey results from [...]
I just found an excellent resource on how to optimize your blog for search engines! It’s the first (free) resource I’ve come across that gives this kind of information for blogs. Most of the SEO articles I’ve read concentrate on websites.
You’ll find a lot of helpful plugins and advice here, so if you are trying to make money using blogs, this resource is highly recommended. Check out the
SEO for WordPress - The Complete Guide
It’s written by Jim Westergren and starts out with these important blogging facts: .
There are 55 million blogs out there, if you don’t stand out you will have no chance. The first second of a visitor’s attention is the most crucial. Your main traffic should come to articles and posts inside your blog, not to the home page. Search engine rankings rely heavily upon the quality and quantity of links to your blog when they determine the ranking. The best way to get links is by natural recommendations from other bloggers or web site owners.
I am surprised that he’s not charging for this information. It has almost as much information on plugins as I found in the Niche Marketing on Crack eBook.
If you want easy-to-use plugins that will make your site more Google-friendly, and advice on article writing, you should definitely check out this free guide.
Take some time and actually do these things. Google is going to punch us sometime soon (I hear it’s going to hurt much more than the previous “slap,”) so you might as well be ready for it!
I figured even the most hardcore cheats in affiliate marketing would know better than to continue promoting “free ringtones” since the Florida Attorney General officially opened an investigation on the matter last week.
It appears some people never learn, or they’re just too damn greedy.
Earlier today, I searched on Google for “free cingular ringtones” and to [...]