Thanks MarketLeverage!
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Just a matter of days after signing up with the MarketLeverage Affiliate Network, we received a care package in the mail from them. Which just further proves my initial comments about the level of customer service at MarketLeverage. Even though we have yet to make a lot of money with MarketLeverage (I’m hoping that will all change after this evening, but more on that in a few days), they really have gone above and beyond to make sure we feel at home with the network.
We received this awesome MarketLeverage golf shirt by Nike, a MarketLeverage hat, a t-shirt which reads “I’m Blogging This” (fitting), and an awesome pen which doubles as a 2 gig USB flash drive!
In case you don’t know about MarketLeverage (and at this point, if you’re in affiliate marketing, you REALLY should), they feature a lifelong referral program with the industry’s highest paying lifetime referral program, the highest paying rewards program in the business, payments sent by FedEx and much more. Click here to sign up with MarketLeverage (and ask for Jen for an affiliate manager; she’s the best!).
Thanks guys!
Going Beyond Keywords: Who Clicks on Your Ad?
Obviously the keywords you target are the meat & potatoes of any PPC campaign and there’s no way to be successful without the right ones. But, in order to really separate yourself from the competition, try thinking about who is searching for those keywords. Who is the typical user for the campaign you’re running (i.e. the typical Internet dating user is male between the ages of 25-50)? Where do they live? And Why do they sign up for the dating sites they sign up for?
Let’s say you’re going to try the CatholicMingle.com offer from NeverBlue Ads - well, obviously you want to research the correct keywords that will generate the most traffic and clickthrus but think about it a little further: Where are the biggest pockets of Catholic people in the U.S.? Who signs up for dating sites? And what phrases (in addition to keywords) in an ad will entice them to click through to your offer?
Making these changes — targeting your ads by demographics and geography — to your campaign might limit the traffic you’ll receive, but it’ll greatly increase the traffic’s relevance and hopefully up your clicks and eventually your conversions.
Using SEO To Improve Your Google Results
I was reading a recent issue of Newsweek when I read an article about how there are a number of hybrid SEO/PR companies popping up that aim to improve your image online. I thought this was a great use of the techniques of SEO, especially in an era where employers are looking at Facebook, MySpace etc. for evidence as why you shouldn’t get hired. Now with the help of Internet reputation repair companies like ReputationHawk, International Reputation Management, ReputationDefender and Done! SEO you can clean up your online image like Wall Street hopeful John did.
The article states that: “when he Googled his name, right there at the top of the page, was an old campus news blog detailing a bar brawl in which John was arrested. Though accurate, the story was posted before charges against the otherwise model student were dropped. ‘It’s the first thing that pops up,’ says John, 25. ‘If potential employers type in my name, they’re going to hire the other guy.’
What these companies do is use the techniques that an aspiring blogger or affiliate marketer, might use to improve the search engine positioning of positive content related to their client. They create links between other Web sites and positive content about you in an effort to push down the offending material to perhaps the third or fourth search engine page – beyond where most people look. This type of service is labor-intensive and runs anywhere from $4,000 to $30,000 and it takes as long as six months to see all those negative hits clear off the first page. There are no guarantees, but according to John, who went with Done! SEO in November, “things are already moving in a better direction.”
Another approach to this is not to depress the offending content, but to have it removed from the Web entirely. ReputationDefender offers a less-expensive and less-complicated service where it hunts down the offending material and asks for the information to be removed. It costs about $30 per item, plus a small monthly monitoring fee. The company, which is about 2 years old, earned $2 million in revenue in its first year.
This is a great service that can be very helpful if you have some negative content about you on the Net, but there are other, easier ways to protect your online reputation. You can take steps like registering yourname.com so that you can both have a domain to post positive content about yourself and ensure that no one can use that domain to discredit or tarnish you. Speaking of positive content, publicize any positive content about yourself so that any negative content that comes up has a large wall to scale before it shows up on the most relevant search engine result pages. Awards, honors, and community service - anything of that nature should be promoted on the Internet to make your search results more positive. The Internet is the next wave in hiring and so having a way to promote yourself online – via a blog, personal website, whatever - will be increasingly important. This is just another way to make sure your online persona is a positive as it can be.
Affiliate Marketing Resources: Part 2
This is part 2 in a series of posts about various affiliate marketing terms, techniques and strategies. This is designed to be a beginner’s guide and cover the basics, although some of the strategies and resources covered can certainly be used by affiliate marketers of all levels. You can read Part 1 here.
Pay Per Click (PPC): A type of affiliate marketing that we have recently undertaken that rewards an affiliate for each unique click to the merchant’s web site, and the affiliate pays a certain amount for each click.
Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost of each one of the clicks on your ad.
Click-Through: The action when a user clicks on a link and follows through to the merchant’s web site.
Click Through Ratio (CTR): The percentage of clicks through to your landing page out of the total number of impressions of your ad. The higher the CTR is, the more likely you are to see more sales and increase your return on investment (ROI). Also, a higher CTR helps your quality score on Google AdWords, which is always a good thing.
Return on Investment (ROI): Something all affiliates want to see, a significant return on their investment. The larger number of sales you make through your campaign means you will see a greater return on your investment than someone who is not converting as many clicks into sales.
Commission: Income an affiliate earns for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant’s web site (depending on the type of offer you are running).
Conversion Rate: The number of clicks that turn into a commissionable act (either a sale or a lead). Obviously, the higher this is the better for you.
Landing Page: The page the customer goes to when they click on your ad or affiliate link. You want this page to be well designed and clear so that the customer can find what they are looking for and so that they will be able to buy the product you are selling. Poor landing pages hurt your sales conversions and will adversely affect your ad in AdWords as well. For those people direct linking to a landing page provided for you through your affiliate network (like us), it may be worth the effort to look into hosting and creating your own landing page in order to improve quality and content, as well as have some control over the page.
Residual Earnings: Programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale a shopper form their sites makes, but all additional sales made at the merchant’s site over the life of the customer. Lots of continued value to this type of affiliate work, obviously, as you’ll continually generate commissions from repeat buyers.
Tracking Code: Refers to the hidden code that is placed on the confirmation page of your store for tracking sales conversions. This is a great way to monitor your keywords as well to see which ones are converting to sales and which ones aren’t.
I Take Back What I Said About Pepperjam
Well, no sooner had I hit the “publish” button on yesterday’s post expressing the frustration I felt with the lack of customer service from PepperjamNETWORK than an email showed up in our inbox from someone at Pepperjam apologizing for letting us down and promising to put us in contact with a dedicated affiliate account rep to answer any and all questions we have.
I have to say, I am VERY impressed with their attentiveness and the speed in which they heeded my call. I’m definitely looking forward to talking with one of their account reps and hopefully doing some work with Pepperjam after all! Thanks, guys!
Initial Reactions to Our Affiliate Networks
So far Nate and I have signed up with four different affiliate networks. We’ve yet to really make any money with any of them so that’s not the way I’m going to structure this review. Instead, I’m going to cover my initial reactions with each network. I’m a very experience-and-customer-service-driven sort of guy, so that’s what really made or broke each network (so far) for me.
1. Neverblue Ads
So far, in my opinion, we’ve had a great experience with Neverblue - the best of the bunch, in fact. I spoke with our affiliate manager for the first time yesterday afternoon and he was very friendly. I told him about our plan to pick up affiliate marketing in our spare time after work, and about the blog. He was very enthusiastic and assured me that he would help us reach our goals and thought we could get where we wanted to be very quickly. He even went so far as to recommend a specific campaign to us which he said has been performing well lately and has a high average EPC (earnings per click) so with it, we’d be able to build a decent amount of capital quickly, which we can reinvest in larger campaigns in the coming weeks. If our initial experience is at all representative of our manager and the company as a whole, my guess is we’ll be working with Neverblue Ads very heavily for a long time to come.
Click here to sign up with Neverblue.
2. MarketLeverage
I decided we should try and sign up for MarketLeverage.com when I saw the awesome gift package they sent Chad from the CDF Networks blog. Again, I guess I’m a sucker for customer service like that, but hey - it worked. I had my first interaction with my MarketLeverage affiliate manager this morning. She was very friendly and we had a nice chat while she signed us up. She promised to give me a call during the coming week when she said she’ll have more time to get to know us and help us get started. So I guess I’ll wait and pass judgment until after that conversation, but so far so good. I like their site - it’s easy to understand and easy to navigate; and I liked that she is a she. And that, based on what I’ve seen elsewhere around the web, they appear to be very good to their affiliates. It means a LOT to me to be more than just another affiliate making the network money. I sure hope it’s not long before Nate and I receive our own MarketLeverage care package!
Click here to sign up with MarketLeverage.
3. ClickBooth
My experiences with ClickBooth have been pretty similar to those with Neverblue. Our affiliate manager got in touch with me right away and set up a conference call with me and Nate so he could welcome us to the program and answer any questions we had (and we had a lot). He wasn’t quite as friendly as the manager from Neverblue but he was still very knowledgeable and helpful. He didn’t give us an exact campaign to start with, but did sort of point us in the right direction. ClickBooth’s website is easy to understand and well laid out. They have a TON of offers to choose from - everything from low risk (low reward) email and zip submits for beginners like us, to very high paying Cost Per Sale campaigns. And they’re all broken down by category and type, so you’re not wading through hundreds of offers you’re not ready to compete in before you find something you feel you can tackle. I’m definitely looking forward to working with ClickBooth more in the future.
Click here to sign up for ClickBooth.
4. PepperjamNETWORK
So far, of the four, I’ve been the least impressed with Pepperjam. I like the layout of their website the best and it’s very easy to check out all of the campaigns they have available. But that’s where the usability stops. Especially for a network which claims to be a “network for affiliates by affiliates” their customer service has been really sub par. I have yet to talk to a live person and no one has bothered to contact us to help us get started. I really feel like just another affiliate here. While that might change if our earnings were to go up, it’s not like we had made anything at any of the other three networks and we were contacted by someone right away. The vast majority of their campaigns are Pay Per Sale, too, which are harder to break into (in my opinion). Unless we find a campaign with Pepperjam that is too good to pass up, I would have to say it will be our last resort. But, if you still want to give it a try yourself,
Click here to sign up with the PepperjamNETWORK.
As we progress with each network, these initial impressions certainly may change, and I expect I’ll be doing some more in depth reviews and analysis of each network as we move forward, so be sure and check back. And if you sign up with any of the networks yourself, please let us know your thoughts and reactions!
Reflections on our First 48 Hours in PPC
Right around this time Tuesday evening, Nate and I officially launched our first ever Pay Per Click (PPC) affiliate marketing campaigns. Since then it’s been nearly constant, boarder-line obsessive monitoring (when I could steal a minute away from my day job or when I was home on my lunch break, that is), tweaking and, well, sleepless nights. And with that, here are my thoughts on the whole thing, so far:
1. PPC marketing is tough
For anyone who thought it was easy, it’s not. There is a ton of research involved; it’s definitely not just plugging in a few related keywords, paying 10 cents a click and away you go. There is, of course, the initial work of finding a niche which has the traffic, the programs to market, the money to make, and isn’t too overcrowded (unless you have the investment capital to fund the high bids needed to convert). Once you’ve discovered your niche, and picked your keywords, there is the actual launching of the PPC campaign - ads to make and test, bids to choose, daily budgets to determine, etc. etc.
Then comes the monitoring - probably the toughest part of the last 48 hours, in my opinion. Seeing what keywords are converting and which aren’t; then upping the minimum bid on the ones that are converting and lowering — or even deleting — the ones that aren’t. And the same goes for the ads themselves, are they converting? What can be done to improve them? How much can you afford to spend per day? How much do you need to spend to get the clicks you need? How’s your quality score, and what can you do to make it better? Should you have all of your keywords in one ad group, or two, or three, or even more? How will you group them?
And maybe most importantly, are the clicks you’re getting quality clicks? Is someone who is searching for your long-tail keyword (let’s say its “Hoodia Weight Loss Pills”) and clicking on your ad the type of person who is going to eventually buy the product you’re promoting? Getting clicks is really the easy part, getting those making the clicks to buy your product is the hard part.
2. PPC marketing is easy
but… but… you just said…. I know, I know. But it is. When I first learned about PPC marketing, it sounded to me like some big scary monster that I would never be able to figure out, let alone be successful at. I thought it would take a huge investment (in either time, money or both) to even just get started. But that’s really not the case. Nate and I have spent the entirety of the last two days at our day jobs and have launched, monitored and and begun to optimize our PPC campaigns really in the few hours between dinner and bed. Really all it takes is the will to just do it; to take the plunge.
3. Research is key
The old adage “measure twice, cut once” I think really applies to PPC marketing. As I mentioned in caveat number one, unless you have a whole bunch of money you can invest (and throw away) in your campaigns from day one, you really need to do your homework. You need to find the high traffic, low cost niches you can compete in for cheap. Then the long-tail keywords within that niche that people are still looking for. THEN the affiliate offer that has the best offer to you, the highest EPC (earnings per thousand clicks), the nicest landing page… really, the offer that will actually convert.
And once again, those are just the steps needed to take before your PPC campaign goes live. Once that happens, there’s a whole new set of things that need to be researched; but I mentioned those already, didn’t I?
4. Experiment
Similar to the “tough/easy” argument - you can research for hours before you launch a campaign (and you must!) but eventually you just have to launch it. You can plan keywords and ads until you go cross eyed and you can swear up & down that you know what people will click on but you really don’t know until you try. Until your campaign is up for a day or two and you can actually see for your self (and then tweak and optimize from there). All research aside, you really don’t know until you try.
5. Clicks don’t necessarily mean conversions
Nate and I launched our campaigns Tuesday evening (it’s Thursday evening right now, for those not keeping track) and by the time I checked how everything was doing before I went to bed that night, we had already had nearly $20 in sales and a whole bunch of clicks. I was ecstatic! I knew a profit on the very first day was rare and we had done it. Our keywords were all converting (some better than others, of course, but nearly all had at least a couple of clicks), or quality score was high and things seemed to be rolling along. I thought to myself “if it’s this easy, we’ll be making serious bank in no time!”
Now, two days later, those few sales from the first couple of hours of our campaign are the only sales we’ve had. Although our clicks have stayed high (we reached our daily budget very early both yesterday and today) and our CTR, quality score, etc. are all still good we haven’t had any more conversions.
We need to figure out where the problem is - is it in the product we’re pushing? I doubt it; the traffic and the clicks are obviously there. I think they’re all niches with a TON of potential. The landing page? Possibly, but we’re direct linking since we don’t have any real experience yet making our own landing pages (or any coding experience…), so there’s not much we can do about that at the moment. Is it the keywords we’re choosing? I think there’s a good chance that’s the case. We have good looking ads that are leading to clicks, obviously, but are they worthwhile clicks? Apparently not. We need to find which keywords the people looking to buy are searching for, not just the ones the people who are just kicking tires are using.
6. At some point you just gotta do it
I think that is the single most important lesson I’ve gotten out of these 48 hours - you have to just do it. PPC is stressful, it’s tough, but it’s fun. It’s been a lot of fun. To me it’s a lot like playing the stock market - you need to research the companies you’re using, the potential they have for you, and the ways in which you can optimize what you’re doing to have the greatest ROI.
I would absolutely recommend finding a coupon code for free clicks when signing up for AdWords or Yahoo or any other PPC engine (most web hosting plans these days come with such codes)! I had $50 in clicks for Google from my hosting plan and it’s definitely been helpful. It allows you to maybe spend more in the first few days than you otherwise would (because you have that $50 that isn’t yours to play with) because you’ve got nothing to lose, so you can take calculated risks you might not otherwise take.
Once you’ve done your research, picked your niche, chosen your keywords and written your ads - go for it. You’ll certainly be enjoying yourself and hopefully making some money before you know it!
Affiliate Marketing Resources: Part I
This will be part 1 in a series of posts about various affiliate marketing terms, techniques and strategies. This is designed to be a beginner’s guide and cover the basics, although some of the strategies and resources covered can certainly be used by affiliate marketers of all levels.
Part 1 is going to cover some common basic terminology you’ll need to be familiar with:
Affiliate Marketing: The namesake of this whole enterprise, affiliate marketing can be defined in various ways. In it’s simplest form, it simply refers to the directing of traffic to certain websites in return for compensation. It’s obviously more in-depth then that, but on it’s face that’s the basis for what affiliate marketing it: driving traffic to websites in return for money.
For more information as to what affiliate marketing is all about and the history of it’s development feel free to check out the following links:
Affiliate Marketing Wiki Page
Affiliate Marketing Starter’s guide (log in to read beginner article - lots of other great content too)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is focused on improving the volume and quality of traffic heading to a website by optimizing facets of the searching process. There are numerous factors that go into determining the “top” websites and SEO focuses on using a number of techniques to improve a given page’s rank in the search engines, operating under the theory that the higher up on the search list a site is, the more traffic it gets. SEO can include anything from how a website is designed and coded to improving content and making the spidering process – or automated content indexing done by search engines – smoother and more relevant.
One of the resources we used to familiarize ourselves with a lot of the basics of SEO was this beginners guide from SEOmoz.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Similar to search engine optimization, SEM is focused more on driving traffic to a given website increasing their visibility on search engine sites. Popular ways to do this include using SEO techniques, as well as purchasing paid placement at or near the to of relevant searches. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are two huge programs used to garner better search results for your site through the process of bidding a certain amount of money on various search keywords, with the more popular and shorter ones costing significantly more.
Long-Tail Keywords: A very important part of affiliate marketing is making sure you not only drive lots of traffic to your website but also to bring the most relevant web searches to your site so they are more likely to click on your advertisements or buy products from your store. Search engine queries are referred to as “keywords”, and the most common, shortest keywords often provide the most general traffic.
Long-Tail keywords are 3-5 word phrases that will often direct more specific traffic to your website, and is a great way to target a niche audience. For example, a lot more people would search for “herbal remedies” then would search for “herbal remedies for acne”, but if you were looking to sell herbal acne medicine, the latter would be a much more relevant group of customers. It’s about balancing the volume and relevance of traffic with the costs, especially as you are just starting out on a tight budget.
Stay tuned for more in this continuing series and as always if you have suggestions for terminology you want defined, programs you want explained or strategies you don’t fully understand feel free to bring those up in the comments section.
Automatically Submit Articles to Hundreds of Directories with Jetsubmitter
I mentioned in the April “income” report that we’d signed up for a service called Jetsubmitter and I’ve definitely been pleased with it so far. As you know (or if you don’t, you need to), having a successful affiliate campaign is all about traffic. The more traffic your site/blog/landing page/campaign/etc. gets, the better your chances of being successful; plain and simple. And while using a PPC (Pay Per Click) service like AdWords is a great way to drive traffic, having residual “organic” traffic from backlinks, articles, and search engines is clutch.
A great way to build backlinks and increase your search engine rankings (thus increasing organic traffic) is through writing articles which link back to your affiliate campaign and submit the articles to article directories. But doing this is both tedious and time consuming. That’s where Jetsubmitter comes in.
It’s actually a two-part service - the first, Jetspinner, takes the article you write and “spins” it slightly as many times as you’d like (from 1 to 999) so that you’re not submitting exactly the same text to article directories each time (a practice the Google spiders doesn’t like, and you can be penalized for having duplicate content). This service is free to use, but you’ll still have to submit each version of your article manually to different directories.
Enter Jetsubmitter. For $17/month, you can have Jetsubmitter automatically submit a different version of your article to as many (or as few) directories a day as you’d like. The site will automatically register and activate accounts for you at each directory site and then submit your articles for you.
Jetsubmitter has nearly 500 directories in its database, so you can quickly and easily build a ton of backlinks to your sites with no extra work needed on your end (so you can focus instead on improving your sites, starting a new campaign, or writing more articles, etc. etc.).
We linked each of our submitted articles back to our herbal biz store and haven’t seen too much traffic from the backlinked yet (it’s only been a few days) but the list of submitted articles is still growing. But, unlike limited-time PPC campaigns, once the links are there, they’re there for good.
The only downside I’ve seen so far is that some of the directories Jetsubmitter has tried to automatically submit articles to haven’t worked (half-assed sites with a zero page rank, mostly), but I definitely think the service is still worth the $17/month and should continue to be a great, and easy-to-use resource for us in all of our ongoing campaigns.
My favorite thing about it is the time and effort the service saves. Something which is crucial for those of us trying to make money in our spare time with limited time to spare. The time Jetsubmitter saves itself is worth the price.
If you’re interested in trying it out yourself, the Jetspinner crew is now offering a 3-day trial offer for only $1 (payable via PayPal). I would definitely recommend it!
April Income (ahem) Report
As I mentioned yesterday, we’re completely new to the world of affiliate marketing (no joke). So, I figured I would write a post that was part joke (you’ll see), part preview (I’ll introduce what we’ve been up to and what we’ll surely write about/review in the coming days), and party to prove a point (that yes, we are total “noobs”). So here you have it, our “income” report for April:
- Registering affiliatebynight.com (using shared bandwidth from a personal blogging hosting plan): -$10
- Signing up for an herbalbiz.com premium store: -$50
- Signing up for Jetsubmitter: -$17
Total income for April: -$77
So it wasn’t a great month… Granted we got started with everything with about a week left in the month, so I’m exaggerating a bit, but it also goes to show you that you’ve got to pay to play. We learned quite quickly that nothing in this business comes for free and there will be no making money without first spending money. I can only hope that one month from today you’ll see our numbers in the black, though.
Stay tuned for plenty more progress reports, reviews, and much, much more. Here we go!
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