Affiliate By Night

Use EzineArticles to Boost Your Traffic & Conversions up to 50%

Getting as much cheap traffic and having as large a conversion rate as possible is the bottom line for making great advertising campaigns. The less you pay for your visitors and the more of them complete your offer, the more money you are going to make. Simple as that.

Everyone is looking for the newest technology or emerging traffic source and often times I feel that people will overlook simple, yet effective methods of getting cheap, targeted traffic. Enter EzineArticles.

I’ve been using this as a way to promote sites that I am working on and get traffic to them for free. It’s free to sign up for the service, and costs you nothing to post articles. Not only can you get traffic & conversions for nothing, the backlinks never hurt either. The best part is the traffic we’ve been seeing converts really well if you publish quality articles. For example, I wrote an article with tips and suggestions for people looking to buy a wireless router. Within 3 days time, I had 328 views and more importantly, 158 clicks over to our site’s URL – that’s a 48.2% conversion rate!

If you are employing any pre-pop tactics on that page you send them to, you are going to increase the conversions even more. It less than an hour I had signed up for EzineArticles, written and published an article and that resulted in almost a 50% conversion rate on the traffic – FOR FREE. Imagine if I had used social media to promote that article…

Now, you should be excited about this, but I imagine there are some skeptics out there so let me go over a few tips for creating a good EzineArticle submission.

1. Focused Articles lead to Paying Customers

The more focused your article is, the more relevant it will be to those who find it. Continuing the above example, I made my article about how to choose a wireless router and went over the 4 major components that people should be looking for when purchasing one. That’s it. I didn’t review a bunch of routers, or explain how to set up a wireless network or talk about the benefits or wireless computing. Just what to look for in a wireless router. All those other things are separate topics and could be articles of their own. With focused content, people find what they are looking for and what you want them to find (your site).

2. Tagging is critical

Tags are one of the main ways people will find your article, and so if you write a focused piece, the tags should be easy to come up with and similarly focused. Using huge tags like “Computer Technology” on that routers post wouldn’t get me the type of targeted traffic that converts as well. People looking for all different kinds of computer technology, not just routers, would find your page and that’s not what you or the user want.

3. Titles = Traffic

Having compelling titles in your articles (and blog posts etc.) make it easier for people to get an idea of what your content is about. It could be the best article ever written on the subject, but if the title is boring – think “Some random thoughts about reading good books” or something similarly uninteresting – no one will bother to read it. People are inherently lazy and that’s why everything you can do to catch their attention and do the work for them will only benefit you in traffic, conversions etc.

4. Follow the rules

The Terms of Service are pretty straightforward at EzineArticles, so make sure to follow them. Don’t put your links above the fold, don’t link to prohibited sites and the most important, don’t over-use a keyword. The last one is the hardest, as my first reaction was to use terms like “wireless router” as often as possible, but that is prohibited. Use the keywords you want to target often, but naturally; usually no more than one or so every 100 words. If you do that, your articles will be approved quickly with no editing required.

That’s exactly what I did to quickly drive some free and targeted traffic to one of our websites. Anyone can do it, so give it a shot and let us know how it went in the comments section. If you aren’t getting as much traffic or conversions as you want, let us help!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Why Building Relationships is like Printing Money

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes people successful and what goes in to making something go viral online and a lot of other stuff (like how an employer chooses between equal candidates) that all sort of relates to one overarching topic: Who do you know?

In my view, it is becoming increasingly important to foster positive business relationships and make contacts with as many people as you possibly can. The more people you are connected to, the more opportunities will present themselves to you and the better positioned you will be to leverage those opportunities when they come your way. I mean this both in terms of building your online business and driving more sales etc. but also for life in general in building a social network and landing jobs, for instance.

A great example of what having strong relationships with people can do for you comes right from my own life. This past year I was in the process of transitioning day jobs and had a particular position that I was really psyched about. Through my previous job I had a couple of contacts already within that organization who I then reached out to expressing my interest in the opening. I asked for additional information on the position and mentioned that I was planning on applying, so would they be willing to put in a good word for me. By fostering a good working relationship with these people, I got myself an interview.

Given the fierce competition for the job (over 1,000 applicants in the 48 hours the posting was open, I was told) I am pretty confident that my connections directly resulted in my getting an interview. Now, I didn’t get this particular job but the point remains that given the myriad of qualified people they had to choose from, having some contacts got my further than most.

The same applies to having a video go viral, or getting a post to the top of Digg or whatever. If you can put it in front of the right people, and have the network established to reach out and ask for a vote or a comment or what have you, it can go a long way. Another example, if you look at the comments for the Affiliate.com T-Shirt contest where I was soliciting votes for (Thanks to all who supported me by the way. I really appreciated it!) it was pretty clear that the two most well supported blogs were this one, and the eventual winner, HeatherinBC.

Now, I don’t know all the criteria that the judges voted on, but I can imagine having a lot of great comments factored into the decision as well. She made a great post, had clearly built great relationships with a lot of people and ended up winning the contest.

Now you might be saying, but I don’t have a huge following yet, or my list isn’t big enough to compete with the heavy hitters in the industry so why bother? Well for one, you can’t win if you don’t try and two, we got a lot of benefits out of participating even if we didn’t win. A free shirt, increased traffic to our blog, promotion of a great cause, exposure to and some nice offers from a new (to us) affiliate network and a lot of fun participating. That right there should give everyone pause to think about how you can take your great content, and just through getting involved, reaching out to others (in a polite fashion) and putting in a little effort can go a long way.

We got a nice additional bonus in the mail today as well. Tom Wozniak from affiliate.com sent a nice note thanking us for the great post and included $100 in Starbucks gift cards as an additional thanks. I was really pleased to get that, it was a great acknowledgment of my efforts in the contest and while it isn’t the grand prize money it’s the start of a nice business relationship. Thanks to the friendly communications I’ve had with Tom and other members of the staff I am more likely to do business with them in the future. Often times it’s the little things that make the biggest difference. Thanks again, Tom! I’ll be well caffienated for the near future.

So remember, as you create your campaigns and read blog posts looking for the next great tool or nugget of advice, think about leaving a comment or sending a thank you recognizing someone for their effort or their contribution. You never know what may come of that initial contact or when you might need to ask that person for a little help down the road.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool

While everyone is probably familiar with the keyword tool associated with Google’s AdWords, they also have another handy search tool for your use – the Search Based Keyword Tool. This handy little tool returns actual Google search queries, giving you some additional phrases or keywords to target.

It is very easy to use as well. You simply enter in the website you want to extract keywords from, put in some keywords you are looking to target and the search based keyword tool will give you a list of actual Google searches related to you site, and the keywords you entered. Best of all, it’s linked to your AdWords account so you can easily add new keywords to your already existing campaigns! Pretty easy way to add a bunch of targets to an existing campaign and who knows, maybe it can help you bring back an old campaign you thought was dead.

Obviously not every keyword or phrase that someone enters into Google is going to be relevant to your campaign, (for example: if you are advertising a dating offer and looking to target “singles” as a keyword, someone could have searched for #1 singles, which is looking for music and not dating) but we find it’s a great way to find additional phrases or keyword we might have missed and get some longer tail targets too.

As if this wasn’t handy enough already, when it displays your results it shows you the average monthly searches, amount of competition for a particular keyword and gives you a suggested bid so you have an idea of how much it will cost to get a top position for a given keyword.

If you haven’t given the search based keyword tool a try yet, you ought to, because otherwise you are leaving profits out there for someone else.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Value of eBooks

I like to read. I also like to do some research before I get started on new tasks. These two things have led me to have a rather large collection of eBooks on my computer that I have read through and have gotten different amounts of value from. You might remember me mentioning one in particular recently, Jonathan Volk’s new guide.

Being on the Internet and in the affiliate marketing space you see a lot of different people promoting eBooks on various topics – Social Media, Ad Words, Ad Sense, Blogging, SEO, PPC, PPV and on and on. Anything that people are using to make money, or develop blogs, or interact with people on the web, there is an eBook for it. That got me thinking, how valuable are eBooks and if you have to pay for them, are they worth the investment?

After collecting a good sampling of eBooks over the past 6-8 months and going through them all, each has their own style and each provided a different amount of value to me. I’m just going to go over my general findings here and you should remember that something that didn’t make sense or resonate with me doesn’t make it a bad product; your mileage may vary.

One of the main things that I found through reading all these eBooks is that the less I knew about a given subject, the more valuable the product often was. A majority of eBooks are given away for free or as a bonus for signing up for an email list and so the cost of acquisition to the user is minimal. Likewise, with the guides given away for free oftentimes they are focused more on the beginner or newbie. That’s great if you want a lot of that type of info. A good example of this is an eBook I read on PPV awhile ago. I had never done PPV, had only heard a little about it and didn’t know many of the networks that had that type of traffic, let alone strategies for making good PPV campaigns. I found even the most basic info about PPV informative and helpful, since my knowledge base was so low.

Alternatively, I was reading through an extensive eBook on blogging and most of the information (like registering a domain, setting up a wordpress account and adding pictures to posts) were things I already knew a lot about. I didn’t get nothing out of reading through this, as I found out about some cool plugins I wanted to check out and got some good info on building a mailing list, but on the whole got less out of it due to my higher knowledge base in that area.

Length, and along with that cost, are two other things I wanted to touch on. For me, I prefer reading through shorter eBooks that get right to the heart of the matter at hand. No need to build me into it with the story of the development of a blog, or how internet marketing has evolved over the years up to now. Focus is key. As you can probably imagine, the longer the eBook, the more it likely costs. Many free eBooks are 20-60 pages or so while the ones that you’ll see for $37, $47, or $97 are much longer and more in-depth. Being  more in-depth doesn’t make it them automatically better though. I’ve got several 200+ page eBooks that are both very in-depth; one is excellent and gave me a lot of great info, walk-throughs and provoked a lot of thought while the other was mostly filler and repetition.

I think an eBook done right has a lot of value to any consumer and will continue to collect eBooks on topics of interest to me. In general, I get the most out of eBooks that are shorter, more to the point and are in areas that I have less knowledge on. Additionally, anytime an eBook provokes thought, gives you take-away tasks or sparks a great idea is a good product in my eyes (A great example, The 31 Days to a Better Blog Workbook from Darren Rowse).

What are your thoughts on eBooks? Do you find them useful? Do you only read free ones, or will you pay for the right product? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Affiliate.com T-Shirt Contest Update -Finalist!

Just wanted to make a quick post to let everyone know that I’m now one of 5 finalists to win the $1,000 prize plus have $1,000 donated to the Red Cross Haitian Relief Fund in my name in the Affiliate.com T-Shirt Blogging Contest (to be decided on Monday, March 1st ). While I certainly would have liked to imagine myself being a finalist or winning the contest, to be completely honest I just had a lot of fun wearing the shirt, putting the post together and hearing what people had to see about the shirt in public. Besides, with the money being donated to the relief effort in the winner’s name and the extra awareness the contest has brought back to that cause is a win for everyone. You can read my contest entry post here.

Now the decision on the winner rests in the hands of the Judges: John Chow, Missy Ward, Zac Johnson and Murray Newlands and they have a tough choice ahead of them as all the final posts are excellent. If you’d like to help my chances on winning, John is taking input from his readers as to who he should vote for. All you need to do is go to his post announcing the finalists and leave a comment urging him to vote for me! Any support is much appreciated!

May the best post win!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Affiliate Marketing 101 Now Available!

No, this isn’t a class at a college (although that would be a great way to earn credits & money at the same time!) it’s the new FREE ebook from super affiliate Jonathan Volk, Affiliate Marketing 101. It’s a very simple and effective 17 chapter guide on how  to make money online using a variety of approaches such as: Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per View (PPV), Social Media and Media Buying.

Having talked to Jonathan before about Internet Marketing, we know personally that he is more than willing to share exactly what it is he is having success with and is great at providing guidance – something you get plenty of in his new guide.

Lots of people get into online marketing without really knowing all that much about it, and this guide will be a real helpful way to sort through all the information out there and get down to the basics and start earning money. Here is what you are getting:

In this guide, I go over the techniques that I have used to generate over $4 million dollars in affiliate marketing commissions including PPC, PPV, Media Buying and Social Media Affiliate marketing!

I have been working extremely hard on this guide and I believe that it will be of great benefit for both newbies and more experienced affiliate alike… I mean, even if you get just one good nugget, it was worth it right? Well, I plan on many of you getting more than one nugget.

Also notable, and a cool feature, is that you aren’t restricted to reading the guide in a .pdf like many ebooks, you also get access to it online. It’s a great read and after only getting through the first half I’ve already gotten some great clarification on setting up PHP redirects and some great info on the increasingly popular PPV marketing that was very informative.

Download your copy of Affiliate Marketing 101.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Free Shirt Challenge – Affiliate.com Contest

At Affiliate Summit West, Affiliate.com was giving out some very popular promotional shirts. They were so popular in fact that people were saying they would even wear them after the show, which is a rarity for free industry t-shirts. In order to have those people who were talking about wearing the shirts after the show put up or shut up, Affiliate.com put their money where their mouth is and started a t-shirt blogging contest. Make a post about wearing your shirt, and you could win $1,000 for yourself, and more importantly in my eyes, have $1,000 donated to Haitian Relief efforts in your name.

[To get on my soap box for a minute, it is important that people not forget about the dire needs in Haiti now that the blitz of news coverage and TV specials have faded. People still need food, water, medicine and other essential supplies to help them continue to rebuild their homes and their lives. Your donations are still needed and still important.]

For those curious, here are a couple of shots of the front and back of the shirt:

Sounds great you are saying to yourself, but I didn’t make it out to ASW so I guess I’m out of luck (exactly what I was thinking myself). However, to get even more people involved, they gave away the few extra shirts they had via email to those who couldn’t attend and I was lucky enough to get one!

I got to thinking about what a good way to display my wearing the shirt would be and decided that I would wear it throughout the course of a normal day and all the places I would go, taking some photos and more importantly keeping track of the comments people made to me as I traveled.

Here I am heading into the airport wearing the shirt:

Best Comment on the shirt at the airport (at security): “Hey Everyone, make some space for the King to catch his flight!” [Waiting in line less at the checkpoint? Don't mind if I do!]

One guy, who may or may not have been enjoying himself a bit much at the airport bar, came up to me and offered to trade shirts with me. As nice as his dress shirt was, we weren’t the same size and I was much more comfortable not changing shirts with a total stranger. The shirt definitely has drunk appeal though.

I also had a bunch of people in the terminal comment on the shirt saying how nice it was, how cool it was and wondering where they could get one so it seems like people outside the affiliate industry like the shirts too and would be happy to wear them out.

After the airport I took a break to check my email and do some “work” online. Translation: I checked and returned some emails, opened up AdWords, got distracted by a GChat from a friend, ended up looking at fantasy baseball rankings for 30 minutes before remembering why I turned on the computer in the first place.

I will occasionally wear certain shirts for various tasks as an internal motivator (State Champs shirt for working out etc.) and this one is probably going to be a good one for me to get some work done in. I can just tell myself that I am the King and so are my campaigns!

My girlfriend, who usually hates most of my wardrobe, commented that this shirt “wasn’t so bad”, so even some of my harsher fashion critics like the shirt and I can keep on wearing it.

After getting some emails sent and some work done, it was time to move on to the next task, which is always a ton of fun – coaching some track.

I am a part-time track coach in addition to all the other stuff I have going on, so I decided to take the shirt to the track.

It was a successful workout for the team and many of them had some interesting commentary on my shirt choice in between intervals. For example:

“Are you auditioning for a part in the new Alice in Wonderland movie?’

” Is that shirt something you wear to intimidate people in poker games?”

“Make some space for the King of the (timing) Clock, everybody!”

Despite the jovial ribbing from the team, they all thought it was a pretty cool looking shirt and were asking me where I got it, thus giving me a chance to explain to them a little bit about the affiliate marketing I do. Several of them were pretty interested in it, so I may be referring some new affiliates soon thanks in part to wearing this shirt.

Lastly, after a busy day, some friends and I went out for some dinner and drinks. Naturally, the shirt came with me.

While watching some Olympic curling at the bar (awesome event by the way) I was approached by a lady who offered to buy the “King of Hearts anything he wants to drink, because he clearly is the coolest guy around.” Not wanting to insult my new friend I decided to let the minor detail that my shirt clearly has a diamond and not a heart on it slide, and accepted a free beer. This shirt is really paying off!

Other excellent comments included:

From our waitress: “Will the King be picking up the tab?”

“Sick shirt, dude! Are those, like, new Burger King promo shirts or something?”

After explaining to several people where the shirt came from, what affiliate marketing was and that I was in fact, not picking up the tab for the entire bar or distributing free Burger King it was time to leave. All in all it was a pretty eventful day for the shirt and I got some potential new referrals, a free beer and lots of (generally) positive commentary on it.

As for the shirt itself, it fits nicely and is lightweight which is great for the coming warmer months. Another huge plus was that the shirt itself is tagless and made from 100% cotton so it’s really comfortable to wear. I like the look of it and will continue to wear it out and about and who knows, maybe I’ll keep getting free beers with it! Thanks again to Tom and everyone else at Affiliate.com for designing a cool shirt and sending me one for free.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Always Be Improving

One of the things that I like about working online and the Internet is that things are constantly changing and evolving and it provides tons of opportunities all the time. For example, think about how Twitter has added another layer to online marketing, through getting paid to tweet to promoting blogs, offers, companies and everything else it can be used for. That didn’t exist a few years ago and now it is a major player for a lot of marketers.

I like to approach this business much like I feel I’ve approached a number of things throughout my life and that is to always be improving. From academic pursuits to athletic and business endeavors I didn’t set out to be THE BEST, but just to always improve on what I had done before. This is especially applicable in the ever-changing landscape of the Internet, where not only are there endless areas to improve but a constant need to improve to meet changing demands and formats.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to teach myself HTML and CSS with the hope of being able to quickly and efficiently build effective landing pages, develop web pages and generally be a more productive and versatile member of the online world. It’ll be awhile before I get to that goal, but given my basic skills in that area currently there is a lot of room for improvement and a lot of benefit to be derived from that improvement.

I also want to work on improving my blogging. Being more efficient in word usage, adding in pictures and videos when applicable and naturally improving the SEO within the posts are the main things that I want to work on here at the blog.

While I am embarking on some self and blog improvement tasks, I welcome you to take stock of your strengths and weakness and focus on an area to improve in the coming months. Additionally, what are some suggestions you, the reader, has on how we can improve the content and experience for you at Affiliate By Night? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Removing Conversion Barriers – Using Pre-Pop

For those of you who don’t know what Pre-Pop is, it stands for Pre-Populate and is a great way to remove some hurdles to conversion in your offers. If you are running an email submit campaign, using pre-pop is a great way to increase your conversions, since it takes literally ALL the work out of the equation for the user by pre-populating their information for them. All that is left for them to do is click a submit button, and voila, you are getting paid.

The lesson here is a simple but important one: people are lazy and the less work they have to do the more likely they are to actually do it. I often find myself not signing up for things because the forms are too long and take too much effort. When it comes to human voting behavior, numerous studies have shown that ballot fatigue is a real thing and people put forth way less thought the longer the ballot is. Less is more, so pre-populating your offers is a great way to remove a potential conversion hurdle for the user.

The question you might be asking yourself now is: That’s great, but how do I pre-pop my offers?

There are two main ways to do this. One is to manually embed the name and email of the person you are sending a link to. An example would be an email marketing campaign for the now closed Shoemoney System. To pre-pop the link for a user on your list (say, Luke) you would do the following.

Take your affiliate link: http://shoemoneysystem.com/?c=YOURAFFCODE

After your affiliate code, enter the following: &name=Luke&email=Luke@gmail.com

The final, complete link looks like this: http://shoemoneysystem.com/?c=YOURAFFCODE&name=Luke&email=Luke@gmail.com

The bolded sections are the ones you change, to your affiliate code and the name and email of your target. While pre-popping an offer is a great way to increase conversions, manually tailoring links to each user you want to target is a great way to waste a lot of time. That’s why the second way to pre-pop an offer is a much faster way of clearing those hurdles, both for you and the user.

Many email marketing services, like Aweber, give you the option of adding user info en mass to an email link or landing page with some simple revisions to the code shown above. Automating this process is well worth the money, as the time you save and the increased conversions you’ll likely see should be significant enough to more than cover the up-front expense of email marketing. Plus, everyone should have a mailing list they are working on developing as it is a great way to promote your brand, make residual income from the same users, and build a community you can call upon and interact with.

The only thing to be careful with when pre-popping offers is that not all offers allow that, so make sure you read the offers carefully and check with your affiliate network if you have questions about pre-popping offers. The last thing tou want to do is spend time and money generating invalid leads.

Have you tried pre-popping offers before? What was your experience like? Let us know in the comments!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Is Your Super Bowl Ad Ready?

With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend that can mean only one thing (other than lots of wings and beer that is…): a big spike in talk about the super bowl. From people looking into kickoff times, general analysis & buzz, as well as Super Bowl advertisements after the game it is a prime time for you to target these people and get some ads in front of them.

All throughout the year there are innumerable events like the Super Bowl that cause highly focused spikes in traffic for certain niches and you can make a killing if you are prepared for the traffic surge. Building a PPC campaign to target one particular team, or just general terms like “Super Bowl” or “Super Bowl Ads”, or you could focus on those people looking for gambling information on the game – the possibilities are endless.

Once you figure out what type of traffic you want to target for the big weekend, it’s easy to find a relevant offer to put in front of them. ZIP/Email submits offers are often popular for this type of blitz advertising, as the user can quickly enter the info you need and move on. Attention spans are often short during the game especially. You could also choose other offers that you think will cater to the crowd doing the searching (generally young to middle aged men for the Super Bowl) – something like Omaha Steaks perhaps. Depending on what affiliate networks you are a part of, there should be plenty of offers to choose from that will cater to your audience.

Get your ads ready and running while there is still time before the game to get them optimized and then as the weekend hits, you should see a really strong boost in your income. The only downside to these types of campaigns is that they are by design short-lived. However, keep them saved and come back to them next time the Super Bowl runs and you can be earning tons of money while you sit on the couch eating wings and drinking beer with your friends. Pretty awesome deal, if you ask me.

Popularity: 1% [?]