If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you’ve probably noticed that my main method of doing affiliate marketing is via PPC, however, what most people don’t realize is that I actually do pretty well using SEO to rank affiliate sites as well as using affiliate programs on content sites or blogs. I don’t by any means consider myself to be an expert in this field of affiliate marketing, but I figured that a lot of people may benefit from hearing the simple phrase that affiliate programs most likely can and will bring in more profits than Google Adsense (or other contextual advertising) if done correctly.

So, without further adieu, here are 10 tips to using affiliate programs on your blog or content site.

1. Know Your Audience!

Most people, while this is one of the most important things, ignore this when they start choosing which affiliate programs they are wanting to promote on their blog or website.  Just because you run a site/blog about birds doesn’t mean your visitors want links to where they can buy birds.  Likely bird food, toys, etc would do better.  Again, while this may seem like common sense it’s amazing how many times I see a site or blog trying to promote something their customers just aren’t looking for.

2. Research What Your Offering!

You readers aren’t stupid!  Assuming they are will only make an ass out of you!  Make sure you do some research on an affiliate program before using them.  Is the product(s) they offer good quality products?  Do they receive good reviews online at the different review sites out there?  This is something that is easy to find out with a quick search so DON’T be LAZY!!!

An even greater thing that will make your readers happy is to know that you yourself are using the product(s). If your not using them, why should your readers?  If you wouldn’t ever buy the product or service yourself then don’t promote it!

3. Don’t Send Your Visitors to Their Homepage!

Another common mistake I see users do when they are using an affiliate program is to link directly to the advertisers homepage.  This is a big no-no in my book and shouldn’t be done unless you absolutely can’t deep-link to a specific product on their site.  And if thats the case, I would start looking for a new advertiser personally.

The reason Google Adsense works so well is because the ads are relevant to what your user is reading about for the most part.  Why wouldn’t you then do the same when using affiliate programs?  When you link to a product don’t just send your visitor to the homepage.  Instead, link them to the actual product page of the affiliate programs site where they can easily read more about the product and buy it all from that page.

From all my personal experiences in this field, the less work (pages) your visitor has to go through to get to the buying point the higher your conversion rates will be!

4. Don’t Strictly Use Affiliate Programs

While I believe affiliate programs can easily allow you to make more than traditional contextual advertising, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use other forms of advertising.  I still strongly recommend using contextual advertising and direct ad sales along side of affiliate programs.

Most people tend to think one will take away from the other, but from my tests and most others, that is very rarely the case.  Different advertising attracts different people!  The people that normally don’t click on contextual advertising may very well click on an affiliate link!

5. Sleep Around!

If your only using or focusing on one particular affiliate program you could very well be losing out on the potential of making a killing using this form of advertising.  If your always promoting the same product or service, how are you advertising to your readers that have already bought that product or service?  You should be using several different affiliate programs on your site/blog.

On the flip side of that, make sure your not using too many affiliate programs at one time.  If every post has 2 or 3 affiliate links in it, chances are your writing content based on advertising instead of writing it based on your readers.  While this may seem like a good idea in your head, it barely ever works out to the best.  There are very few niches I know of that can do this and actually gain readers and increase revenues tremendously.  One of those such niches is in the Make Money Online niche.  I’m sure most of you have seen it and sometimes I think we get the idea that this works in all niches, however, it doesn’t!

6. Does it Sell Well Online?

Is the product or service your trying to promote sell well online?  Again going back to my bird example from one of the points above, assume that you have a blog/site about animals/pets.  Now while there are affiliate programs out there for selling pets online, is the market wide enough compared to something else you could be offering?

Now there are people that buy animals online and have them shipped to them, especially rare fish.  However, this doesn’t mean that allocating a link for buying a fish online instead of a link for buying fish good online is a good idea.  What is going to sell better online and potentially bring you in a bigger profit?  Just because there is an affiliate program for something doesn’t always mean its a great program.

7. Don’t Try to Hide it!

Trying to cover up that fact that a link leads to an affiliate program where you can potentially make money really isn’t necessary and in fact can sometimes hurt you.  Especially in a tech savvy niche where users realize what’s happening.

Most people don’t care that your trying to make money from your site/blog as long as your being honest about it.  However, a lot of people don’t just assume you are trying to make money from your site/blog so by trying to hide it, your visitors may very well think your trying to dupe them into buying something just so you’ll earn money from doing so.  Be honest about your income streams and if your using products that you would personally recommend to a family member, you won’t have a problem!

8. Track Your Results!

Tracking which programs are converting and which aren’t will allow you to realize better as to tip one which was know your audience.  If you know what products or services your readers are buying, then you know what to continue to promote.  It’s as easy as that!

If your not tracking your results, you essentially losing out on money.  We all want to increase how much we are making and one of the easiest ways to do this is to make sure your advertising correctly to the visitors you already have!

I’d love to hear any other suggestions you guys may have for using affiliate programs on your blog or site.  In fact, I’m sure all my readers would love to hear some more tips on potentially increasing the revenue they receive from their blog or website.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Most of you have heard of Tracking202 from Wes Mahler.  It’s a service that’s completely free to use and allows you to track which keywords in your PPC campaigns are converting and which ones aren’t.  This allows you to bid higher on keywords that convert and get rid of keywords that don’t.  Sound pretty simple right?  We’ll believe it or not, most affiliates have a very hard time tracking keywords and most new affiliates don’t have the money for a paid tracking tool.

Also, most people don’t like that idea of sharing which keywords are converting with these companies that allow you to track for free.  For example, Google Adwords Pixel, Yahoo’s Pixel, and even Tracking202.  This is where Prosper202 comes into play.

Prosper202 is a free PPC keyword tracking application from Wes Mahler and his crew.  It’s the same people that created Tracking202 only this tool (Prosper202) allows you to host the application directly on your hosting account if your not willing or are feeling nervous about your keyword information being out there on someone else’s server.

You can visit their site for more information about the product and all of it’s features, as I’m only going to touch on a few of the products features.

• Works with Every Single PPC Network Out There!
• Cloaks Keywords from Advertisers and Affiliate Networks keeping them a secret!
• Works with Landing Pages or With Direct Linking!

Again, it seems like a great tool, I’ve only been able to play around with it for a little while but I definitely think you should check out the service being provided by Prosper202 if your in need of a great keywords tracking application.

Also, just to give you guys a little recap and to give a little more insight on some of their other “202″ tools they have available…

• Tracking202 - PPC Keyword Tracking tool that is completely FREE of charge.  This application is hosted on their servers.  Good if you don’t have a server to put Prosper202 on and you wanting to use this program.
• Prosper202 - Same thing as Tracking202 only you can use this version on your own server thus allowing you to keep all your secret ninja like stuff from getting into the wrong hands.
• Export202 - Allows you to easily convert campaigns from one PPC campaign to another.  Currently works with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.  Again this program like the other two is completely free to use.

Again, I think Wes Mahler and the team are doing a great job and I can’t wait to see what other tools they release under the “202″ brand.

Popularity: 38% [?]

A landing page or landing site is one of the most important aspects to an affiliate marketing campaign in my opinion. Your visitors can convert or leave based on your landing page. You control the conversion rate and can easily take a campaign losing money and turn it into a campaign that is a winner simply by your landing page. One simple way to do this is to split test your landing pages, however, unless you know what your doing wrong, split testing won’t do you much good because you won’t know what is causing the problem!

This topic will explain some common mistakes that people make when creating landing pages. Hopefully after reading this post you’ll be able to clearly understand the problems your landing page may be causing!

1. Your Call to Action is below the Fold - Your call to action is what causes your visitors to go from your landing page to the offer or service your promoting thus the reason it’s called a call to action. This could be a big red button that says sign up for free, or a list of features with a sign up now button, etc. So, why would you want your call to action below the fold when you automatically lose ~30% of your visitors if they have to scroll down?
2. Trying to Collect too Much Data - Trying to get a visitor to sign up for a newsletter is fine for future sales to an email list you put together, however, you may be hurting your conversions! The more information that you try to collect from your visitors the more likely they won’t end up completing the offer. Try to keep your data collecting to a minimum and only collect information that you truly need!
3. Missing Testimonials - Testimonials can greatly increase conversion rates and instill trust in your visitors eyes. They tend to help the visitor realize that the product/service your offering is worth their time in filling out any necessary information or even whipping out their credit card. If you can use testimonials in your niche, your only hurting yourself by not at least trying them out on your landing page!
4. Too Many Call to Actions - As said above you need to have a clear call to action above the fold. You shouldn’t ever have more than 2 call to actions on a landing page. Asking a user to sign up for an offer or service your offering would be one call to action, asking them to sign up for a newsletter would be another call to action. Asking users to subscribe to newsletters, subscribe to your RSS feed, give you a call, etc may sound like a great idea to get return customers and build up a great list, having too many can cause confusion and also end up making the visitor forget why they even came to your site, thus, you lose out on a commission!
5. Not Split Testing Landing Pages - Another mistake I see people commonly make is to not split test their landing pages. I recently wrote an article about split testing landing pages, how to do it, what parts of your landing page to split test, etc. If you haven’t check it out already, you need to as split testing can greatly increase your profits and allow you to find out which landing page(s) work best!

So there you have it, five reasons your landing page may suck! Get to work and correct the problems on your landing pages and immediately see the results. You’ll be amazed at what a few simple things can do to your conversions!

Popularity: 40% [?]

We all hear about split testing when it comes to affiliate marketing. When we normally hear someone mention split testing, they are talking about split testing ads. In this article however, I want to talk about split testing your landing pages.

Split Testing is basically the process of testing different variations of Ad Copy (Ads), Landing Pages, Your Price, etc. The reason that we split test and especially in affiliate marketing is so that we can increase our conversion ratio or ROI (return over investment). Basically what that means is this…

Let’s say you start a campaign for dating. Let’s also assume that for every one dollar you spend on advertising via PPC you make two dollars. Now by split testing you can increase how many people that come to your landing page convert. By doing so, now when you spend one dollar on advertising via PPC, you make 3 dollars!

Split Testing allows you to make more without spending more!

Now, I’ve already wrote an article on Split Testing Ads which you may also wish to check out if your completely new to the idea of split testing or just want a refresher course.

Okay, now that I’ve explained what split testing is, let’s dive into why you should split test your landing page, the benefits of split testing your landing page, and how to split test landing pages.

Benefits of Split Testing Your Landing Page:

The benefits of split testing are numerous but I just want to touch on the most important in this article. So without further adieu…

Increased Conversion Rate - The single most important reason for split testing your landing page is to increase conversions. Increasing conversions allows you to spend the same amount of money, yet increase your revenue while paying the same amount for advertising if your using PPC (pay per click).

Quality Score - Another benefit although not always as easy to test, is the ability to increase your quality score that you receive from Google Adwords. Again this is hard to test as the quality score can take a couple days or even weeks to recalculate each time.

Again, there are several other factors that split testing can accomplish, however, in order to keep this article short and to the point I’ve decided to only list the top reasons in my opinion.

What should I split test?

Okay, so you now realize the benefits to split testing landing pages, but how do you do it? Which parts of your landing page do you change? Do you have two completely different landing pages or two similar ones with only certain parts changed?

The answer to this question is that there really isn’t a right or wrong way, although if you do use two completely different landing pages for your testing, once you find one that works well, I would recommend moving on to the latter.

So, in reference to that, below is a list of things you may want to consider changing to increase landing page conversions.

1. Split Test your Heading! Your heading is the first thing that people notice when they come to your site. Thus, people could stay or leave your site based just on that one main headline! In fact, people will leave or stay based on your headline. I’ve seen a headline instantly increase conversions by three hundred percent to five hundred percent!
2. Split Test your Sub-Headline! Your sub-headline is probably the second most important thing you should split test following right after your headline. Again, by creating another landing page with just simply your sub-headline changed you could increase your conversion rate by one hundred and fifty percent to two hundred percent!
3. Split Test each Paragraph! Split testing your paragraphs can take a lot of work, and most of the time you really only need to focus on split testing your first paragraph. Personally I only worry about the first paragraph when I’m split testing and very seldom split test my others. I will however rewrite the rest of my paragraphs once I have split tested my first paragraph and know what works for the niche I’m currently working on!
   TIP: Using 3-5 bullets stating the main points of the offer/service you are promoting generally works extremely well for your first paragraph! This is probably because most internet users will skim pages instead of taking the time to fully read each paragraph.
4. Split Test your Call to Action Line/Button! Does a green button work better than a blue button? How about a red color one? Does Order Now or Order Today work better? Can you use the word free? Your call to action button can make a customer leave your site even if they’ve read and looked over everything else. Your heading, sub-heading, and article/description could be perfect! Yet, you’ll still lose visitors if your call to action doesn’t well….call the user to perform an action!

As you can see, there are several factors to test when your split testing your landing pages, and hopefully the above steps will help you get started!

Okay, so now your wanting the code in order to do this easily correct? Well the code below allows you to test two different landing pages and each time a visitor comes to your site it will randomly send them to one or the other. Then you simply switch out the worse performing landing page with a new one every couple of days.

PHP Code for Split Testing Landing Pages


<?php
if(rand(0,1) == 0) {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split1");
} else {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split2");
}
?>

In the code where it says split1 and split2, you would replace that with whatever you call your two filenames.  Make sure you also put .html or .php after the filename depending on which extension your using.  Also, don’t forget to change www.example.com to your sites URL!

So, there you have it!  Now get out there and start increasing your ROI by split testing your landing pages!

Popularity: 53% [?]

I was reading the Click Consultants Forums and someone asked the question, Should I be using PPC to drive traffic to my affiliate pages or should I be using SEO? This is a question that I get a lot, and I see a lot of people ask on other blogs and forums, yet I never really see a definitive answer and a list of the benefits and cons of each. That’s why this post has been born, to help you decide which is best for you and for your situation.

First, let me come right out and ask you all a question. Why would you only do one or the other? Now you may have a very valid reason for doing so and I’d love to hear it, however, I personally use both PPC and SEO to my advantage in my affiliate marketing career. Thus, this is what I recommend you do and I’ll explain why in this post.

Let’s get started with PPC first.

Advantages to using PPC (pay per click):

• Instant Traffic! Your ads are visible and clickable within minutes. Visitors will be to you site within minutes of setting up a PPC campaign.
• Extremely targeted customers. Since you choose the keywords you know your visitors will be looking for exactly what your selling/offering.
• You Control Everything! Unlike SEO, you decide where your ad is placed, how it looks, what it reads, the price you pay, the amount of time it runs, etc.
• You only pay for Clicks! You don’t pay unless a visitor actually clicks your ad when your advertising via PPC.

Disadvantages to using PPC:

• It’s Not FREE! Unlike SEO, this traffic costs you something and you have to be careful about going over your budget or spending more than you make!
• There is a Danger of Losing Money! While it’s easy to setup a PPC Campaign, it does require time and experience to learn how it works and how to use it effectively.
• Requires a lot of Tracking. When your using PPC you need to track everything!  You should be tracking landing pages, ads, and keywords to see which is converting better.  This means you should be split testing your landing pages and ads.

Now, let’s move onto SEO:

Advantages to using SEO (search engine optimization):

• Completely FREE Traffic! Unlike PPC, the traffic that you receive via your SEO efforts is completely free.  Doesn’t cost you a penny.
• Can Lower PPC Costs! When used in conjunction with PPC it can help you increase your quality score in Google Adwords thus reducing the amount you need to pay in order to secure top positions in PPC.
• Excellent long-term Potential! Although SEO takes a while to rank for certain keywords, the benefits can last for years to come.  With PPC you will always pay for clicks, with SEO, you will always receive those clicks for free.  So, its a great way to build a long-term campaign.

Disadvantages to SEO:

• Requires Time! Unlike PPC, SEO can take some time to rank for certain keywords, as much time as a month to several years!
• Requires Extensive Knowledge: In my opinion, learning SEO will take you a lot longer to learn than PPC.  There are tons of factors to SEO, whether they be big or small, so be prepared to spend time learning!

Now to wrap up this post!  The reason I listed the advantages and disadvantages to each is because well, there isn’t a right or wrong answer as to which one you should be using.  That’s a decision you need to make.  As I said above I personally use both methods and in the next paragraph I’ll explain why I do and why I think you should as well.

PPC and SEO go hand in hand the more intelligent algorithms become.  Google Adword’s Quality Score looks at tons of factors to consider how much you should pay for a top spot in their PPC engine.  Some of these factors include things like Ad CTR%, Bounce Rate, and Relevancy.  However, it also includes things like how many sites are linking to yours using relevant anchor text, if the keywords on your landing page match those in your PPC account, etc.

As you can see, not only do they look at PPC factors when they decide your Quality Score, they also look at things that would be considered SEO factors.

Also, as mentioned above, SEO traffic is free!  So even if your not a die hard SEO person, like myself, it still makes sense to at least try it out in order to receive free traffic.

Personally, the way I do it, is to first build my PPC campaign and after I have it up and running and making a profit I’ll start doing some SEO work to my site as well.  Again, as I said above, it’s a great long-term strategy.  As more and more people use PPC, prices are going to continue to rise so what would be a feasible amount to pay for traffic now, may not be feasible in 2 years from now.  However, if over those 2 years you’ve used SEO to your advantage, your campaign will still be receiving tons of traffic thus it could still be quite a profitable campaign even if you stop doing PPC on it.

Let me know what you guys think in the comments and if you have any advantages or disadvantages to using either PPC or SEO.  Also, let me know what method you personally use and why!

Popularity: 53% [?]

I was talking with a friend of mine today whom has just gotten himself started in affiliate marketing about 3 months ago. He asked me a question that got me thinking. He has hit his first goal of 5,000 dollars a month from his affiliate marketing business, however, he now feels stuck and is having a difficult time growing his business.

This post will hopefully provide him as well as all my readers some tips on growing your affiliate marketing business with ease and simplicity.

Offers Come and Go!

One of the first mistakes I saw him making was focusing on niches that come and go. He was doing a lot of seasonal offers like taxes for example. Now, these are really great niches to get into and seasonal niches can really bring in a big buck in a short period of time, because a lot of people don’t worry about seasonal offers at all, including myself! ::embarrassed::

However, he was mostly only focusing on these seasonal niches, so he would get a campaign doing well, and then it would fade in a month and he would have to basically start from scratch.

Also, even regular campaigns you setup, you need to realize that any day the network could pull the offer that your running, or the company could end the affiliate program. So you should always be prepared. I’m a very big believer in scaling a campaign as much as you can, but I’m also experienced enough to know that you shouldn’t only be concentrating on one or two niches!

So my advice to you if your in this category is to work on setting up some other niches, some niches that are pretty safe in terms of they’ll be here for a while. Just some examples, ringtones, dating, insurance, etc. Continue to do your seasonal offers as they are a great way to make a good income, but don’t rely totally on those niches.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin!

Another problem I see a lot of young affiliates do is spread themselves too thin.  They start making money and instead of focusing on scaling their campaigns or starting new campaigns, they instead decide to start a blog on affiliate marketing, etc.

Now, I have no problem with an affiliate starting a blog about affiliate marketing, in fact, I encourage it eventually because it’s great for several reasons which I’ll talk about at a later time.  The thing you need to remember is in the beginning your working on growing your affiliate business.  Blogs and other side projects take a lot of time, and they don’t normally supply the money like your current affiliate marketing business would if you scaled it some more.

Another point of affiliate marketing is too not try to start up too many offers at the same time, or have too many campaigns that require your daily attention running at the same time, etc.  If you start campaign after campaign without actually finishing and scaling a previous campaign your going to neglect campaigns you’ve already done and before you realize it they are going to start losing money as others compete against you in your niche and win!

Become Friends With Your Affiliate Managers

One of the quickest and most effective ways to make more in any given niche is to get a higher payout on an offer that your running.  The best way to do this isn’t bringing in tons of volume, okay maybe it is for a really big payout, it’s simply becoming friends with your affiliate managers.  Talk to them, chat them up a bit.  That doesn’t mean IM them and ask them a ton of questions, they get enough of those everyday, instead maybe ask them if there are any offers you should be running and then strike up some small talk.  It works wonders!

Make Sure Your Tracking at The Keyword Level!

I get the question of how do I scale/grow my affiliate business all the time, yet when I ask them which keywords are converting for them currently, they can’t tell me!   They aren’t tracking at the keyword level.  Yeah you can make money in this crazy game we call affiliate marketing, but if your not tracking your keywords its near impossible to scale without just throwing in a bunch more keywords and hoping for the best.  Tracking is key in this business!!!

I wrote a post about Keyword Tracking via Google’s Adwords Pixel, and I’m soon going to write one about using Yahoo’s Pixel to track keywords.  If your not sure how to track keywords at the keyword level you may want to check the post out as it gives you one good option.  There are several ways to do it.

Make Sure Your Split Testing Everything!

Another quick and easy way to increase your income is by split testing.  You should be split testing your Ads, Your Landing Pages, whether broad, phrase, or exact match works best, etc.  SPLIT TEST EVERYTHING!!!

Split testing allows you spend less yet make the same amount of money by increasing conversions, increasing your quality score which allows you to bid less for the same position, etc.  Make sure you doing this!

I wrote an article recently about split testing ads and how to do it!  You may want to check it out if your not sure how it works.

Conclusion:

I hope these tips well help you grow your affiliate business and give you a starting point when your not sure what to do.

If anyone has any other suggestions for affiliate marketers who are already making a little each month from affiliate marketing but want to grow their business please let us know in the comments.  I would love to hear your suggestions.

Popularity: 61% [?]

I just wanted to point out, for those of you that haven’t notice, that I have installed Brian’s Threaded Comments Plugin for Wordpress.

For those that don’t know what this plugin does, it basically allows user’s to reply to someone else’s comment and then their comment is nested under that person’s comment so that it’s easy to tell which comments refer to which comments.

A lot of times, someone wants to reply to something someone else has said and that person might of been the second person to make a comment on the blog and your the tenth person, so the comments are kinda spread out a bit and its hard to tell which comment you were replying to sometimes.

This plugin basically changes all that and makes it quick and easy to reply and to tell who is replying to who.  It’s a great plugin and if you’ve never checked it out for your blog, I highly recommend doing so.

On a side note, I’ve also installed the subscribe to comments plugin which allows you to receive email updates when someone posts a new comment on a specific post.  That means if there is a post that you really enjoyed and you want to see what others think, you can subscribe to that particular post and receive updates when someone makes a new comment.

I installed this plugin because I had several readers request it.

Popularity: 56% [?]

There are a lot of people out there that will tell you that trying to make money on the internet is a waste of time and it only happens to a few people.

This simply isn’t true. Not in the least! There are tons of people making money on the internet and there are even more options for you to make money on the internet. It just takes a couple key factors and a great mindset. So, I figured I’d like to do a post on can I actually quit my day job and what steps do I need to take to do so.

Get Ready To Work!

For some reason, people think that working online is a fast way to make money without doing crap. I sometimes think this is because of the whole make money online niche of products out there that promise to make people rich overnight on the internet, however, I also think common sense should tell you that running a business, any type of business, isn’t an easy thing to do and takes a lot of work!

So, my suggestion to you is to quit looking for a free ride where you don’t have to work for it. Get yourself ready to do the work that is going to be required of you in order to succeed. If you don’t want to do the work, continue your 9-5 job and quit acting like the world owes you a favor. No offense!

Don’t Be Afraid to Take a Risk!

One of the biggest reasons, in my opinion, that a lot of new affiliates fail is because they are too afraid to take a risk of losing some money.  Before you even start affiliate marketing you should have some money saved up specifically for using for affiliate marketing and expect to lose it!!!

When you first start out in affiliate marketing I’m sure if your anything like I was your reading 5-10 different blogs on affiliate marketing, reading all the affiliate forums, etc.  However, until you actually spend some money that stuff is useless in my opinion.  Am I saying that affiliate forums and blogs are worthless?  Absolutely not, what I am saying however is that unless you start to apply what you learn its pointless to waste your time.

You will learn so much by actually running a campaign that losing money should be seen as part of your affiliate marketing education.  There are just some things that are hard to explain on a blog or that just aren’t because people don’t think to write about them…including myself!  So don’t be afraid to lose some money.  If your starting this business with the hope that it will become your main income don’t get started in affiliate marketing.  You need to have another source of income because 90% of affiliates fail on their first couple of attempts.

Again, don’t take that as a bad thing, take it as a learning experience and don’t be afraid to lose some money in order to gain skills that will help you in your career and will allow you become a full-time internet marketer!

Don’t Become Lazy!

Another common mistake I see new affiliates make, and I made this mistake myself, is after they start making some money from affiliate marketing they go buck wild!  They start spending the money faster than a speeding bullet and quit working as much because for some reason they feel that they will continue to make the money without doing anymore work…which takes us back to the first topic!

Don’t become lazy, laziness is one of the easiest traps to fall into when you work from home and on the internet.  Doing this for a couple months and your money thats coming in will cease to exist.  Instead, work on scaling your affiliate campaigns and starting some new offers.

Don’t Quit Your Job Too Early!

Again this is a mistake I personally made.  When you start making enough money to replace your job income one of the first things we want to do as humans is quit that God Awful job!  However, I personally recommend that you keep your job and instead use that money your making from affiliate marketing and reinvest it into your business.

A good number to quit your job I have heard is 3 times your job income.  I totally agree with this!  Affiliate Marketing can vary month by month.  One money you may have an offer that brings in 5k and the next it may only bring in 2k.  It happens and its not unusual.  So being prepared will help you when those tough months come.

Have Fun!

The last tip I want to talk about is simply this!  Have FUN!  You are looking at becoming an affiliate marketing because most likely you wish to be your own boss.  You wish to be able to schedule your work around your life and not the other way around.  The opportunity is here for you to make a living by working online and from home.  The benefits are amazing, so enjoy it.  If you drudge doing it everyday, it’s probably not going to work for you.

If your having fun doing what you do, your more likely to not become lazy, to constantly want to improve your business, and succeed.  Online Marketing can completely change your life and for the better, however, if your not having fun your not going to want to do it your whole life.

Wishing you success!!!

Popularity: 65% [?]

I was facing my first writer’s block and couldn’t think of anything to blog about and I really wanted to do a blog post tonight cause I had the time.

I’m not use to posting this frequently on a blog! I guess I still have a lot to learn about when it comes to blogging and keeping ideas popping into your head! Anyways, so because I couldn’t think of anything to write about, I made a tweet on twitter asking if anyone had any questions they would like to see covered in a blog post and BlueHeronTrail asked which was better to use a landing page or a landing site (ie. blog, website, etc) I decided to include Direct Linking as well as believe it or not it still works!

So, enough of that let’s get into it!

Direct Linking

First, allow me to explain what Direct Linking is for those that are just getting started in Affiliate Marketing.

Direct Linking is when link directly to an advertisers landing page. Most affiliates normally buy a domain name, some simple hosting, and create their own landing page that they send visitors to first before sending them to the offer(s) landing page. There are two main ways to Direct Link to an affiliate offer.

The first way and most used method of Direct Linking to an affiliates page is by using the affiliate URL your given when you sign up with a company. For example the link may look like this http://x.affiliate.com/publisher/5674 That of course is just an example and doesn’t actually link to an offer.

The second way is to buy a domain name and point the domain name straight to the offers landing page. This method isn’t used as much as the first method is, however, I truly feel that this is the best way to link to an offer and I’ll explain why below.

Advantages to Direct Linking:

[] Allows you to quickly test an offer to see how well it converts before building an entire site around the offer.
[] If the advertisers landing page is good enough quality and having a landing pages seems to cut down on conversions instead of helping.
[] Very easy to setup. You don’t need any knowledge of html, css, or php. You also don’t need to buy a domain name or hosting if you don’t wish to, however, I do recommend buying a domain for Direct Linking.

Disadvantages to Direct Linking:

[] Normally its pretty hard to get a good quality score in Google Adwords when Direct Linking.
[] You are unable to presell the customer. Preselling the customer can easy increase conversions by 200% if you take the time to learn how to do so properly.
[] You won’t normally receive any organic (free) traffic when direct linking. You may receive a little if you are direct linking with a domain name, however, I’ve never received any amount of organic traffic worth talking about.

Why should I use a Domain Name when Direct Linking?

As I said above, most people when they direct link to an offer they don’t even use a domain name. I however, believe that using a domain name even when direct linking has some really nice benefits to it.

First, you are able to build links to your own domain name and keep them if you decide to later build a landing page or site around an offer. I submit almost every offer I run to quite a few directories to start building up some organic traffic and to rank for keywords in Google. Once I know an offer is profitable I immediately start building links to it, even if its just a few well placed ones.

Secondly, Google Adwords has recently changed their Display URL policy saying you have to use the same domain as what is in your destination URL. If your running an offer through any CPA network like AzoogleAds the link for the offer your running normally redirects through their ad server anyways. Having a good keyword rich domain name can increase everything from your Quality Score in Adwords to your CTR%.

Those are the two main reasons why I always use a domain even when testing an offer by direct linking. You can get them for so cheap I don’t see a good reason not to just buy one. If the offer doesn’t work, I get rid of the domain! Simple as that!

Landing Pages

This is by far the most used method when it comes to affiliate marketing. You buy a domain name, throw up a one page site basically called a landing page and have an article or two with several links to the offer page and thats it.

There are several advantages to this method over direct linking and a couple disadvantages.

Advantages to a Landing Page:

[] Easier to setup than a full landing site (website focused around an affiliate offer).
[] Still pretty easy to get a decent quality score even with Adwords believe it or not, although it is becoming increasingly harder and I believe within another year or two, landing pages will need to become landing sites.
[] Extremely great for seasonal offers as you wouldn’t want to spend too much time on offers that are only good one month out of the year.
[] Allows you to presell your customers thus increasing your conversion rates significantly.
[] Allows you to be more flexible. Some examples are… You can collect email addresses for sending out future offers, you are able to track using php on the keyword level fairly easily using simple cut and paste techniques!

Disadvantages to Landing Pages:

[] Slowly becoming harder to get a great quality score with Adwords as they like content and lots of it.
[] Requires more time to setup than direct linking which could all be in vain if the offer doesn’t convert well enough and you end up having to cancel it.

Again, Landing Pages are the now. They are what’s working and they work well. I don’t believe they will work forever, however, who’s to say they don’t work for another 5 years! Google continues to increase their quality algorithms and they love content and multi-page sites. They want websites to have value to them and not just try to hurry up and send a visitor to someone else’s site only to be redirected yet again without adding any real value to the customer.

Landing Sites

When I say Landing Site basically I’m talking about a Landing Page that has more than just one simple page. A landing site has multiple pages, multiple articles, useful information for consumers, etc. They sometimes have a blog tied to them. Basically anyway you want to do it is fine. I don’t personally believe there is one right way or wrong way when it comes to building a landing site. Some people use a blog to add content, some don’t. The choice is entirely up to you, either way seems to work fine. I’ve personally done it both ways and haven’t seen a problem yet with one or the other.

Advantages to a Landing Site:

[] Google loves these sites, they love the fresh content that gets added to these sites, they love the fact that they typically help the customer and add value a little more than just a simple landing page.
[] These sites can very easily rank for keywords in Organic Searches thus providing tons of free traffic.
[] Easier to get good quality scores when using Google Adwords.
[] Plus all the benefits of a Regular Landing Page.

Disadvantages to a Landing Site:

[] Very time consuming to build these websites.
[] Constantly have to be updated with fresh content in order to be most effective.

So which do I use?

I personally feel and believe that there is a purpose for each type of linking. Let me give you a few examples.

Let’s say your trying out a niche that honestly you don’t know much about but have heard it’s doing well. Your not sure what works, what doesn’t, what type of landing page to create, if it will convert for you, etc. I would personally direct link to the offer first to test out these things and to give it a quick test. Now that’s just me speaking, I know people that do nothing but direct link and they make tons of money. Direct Linking still works but it tends to be more of a short-term income. You get an offer doing well and a couple months it dies, whereas landing pages typically last a lot longer.

Let’s say you’ve tested out a niche and your breaking even, or even making a little profit, or even maybe just losing a little money. You decide that the niche has potential and you’d like to try to scale on it and build. I would then throw up a Landing Page and work on increasing my conversion rate by preselling the customer, increasing my ad ctr%, etc.

Let’s say that you realize after your landing page has been up a while that you could really scale this campaign and you not only want PPC traffic but you also want to start driving SEO traffic to the site, I would then convert my landing page to a Landing Site by either adding a blog or adding an article page.

I hope this article helped you out and explained to you the advantages and disadvantages to using each of the three methods.

Let me know if you have any other questions about the three below in the comments.

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[BEGIN RANT]

Sometimes I think Yahoo, by Yahoo I mean Yahoo Search Marketing, is retarded. They do the stupidest things and without doing it properly.

As most of you have probably heard by now, Yahoo Search Marketing has changed the way the minimum bid works. It’s no longer fixed at $.10 like it has been, now it could be higher or lower for each specific keyword depending on two major factors according to Yahoo’s Blog and I Quote…

Quality—High quality generally means that your ads are being clicked more often, relative to your competitors. We try to reward quality with higher rankings and lower costs, and now, potentially, with lower minimum bids.

Value—We look at a number of things to determine what a keyword is worth: for example, how many advertisers are bidding on your keyword, and what they’re willing to pay for it.

Now, there are some people that are sticking up for Yahoo basically saying we have seen this coming, they are trying to be more like Google Adwords, etc… My response to them is…

Your just as retarded as Yahoo!!!

Here is why I disagree with what Yahoo is doing and people that support it!

First off, Lets take a look at the line about Value. They are basically saying that ads that are clicked more, are relative to competitors deserve to pay less for keywords so instead of .10 cents they may only pay .06 cents. Now, I understand this for the most part and yeah I’ll give points since this is kinda something similar to how Google Adwords works, however, there is one big flaw here!

I have yet to hear of someone actually paying less than .10 cents or even having a keyword where the minimum bid is less than .10 cents. Also, you must have a good enough algorithm to do this. Google’s Adwords algorithm isn’t perfect but it works for the most part, whereas Yahoo’s advertising algorithm blows balls! BIG TIME!!!

I’ve had ad groups that work perfectly in Adwords, however, when I put them into Yahoo I have ad quality scores of 2 or 3 bars out of 5 bars. Yet, I can just throw a bunch of keywords into an ad group and just make a bunch of general ads and have 5/5 bars for my ad quality score. Do they really feel their quality algorithm is good enough?

Let’s talk about the second part of that quote, the part about Value. To me this is simply stupid, it doesn’t even make sense to me! I’m not sure if they just didn’t explain it properly or if their really this retarded. Basically what I get from this statement is that they will set minimum bids on keywords if they feel they should get paid more for that keyword. Lets say for example the keyword Insurance, Yahoo is basically saying we feel that we should get at least .40 cents per click from the keyword Insurance so we are raising your minimum bid to match what we feel the keyword is worth.

ROTFL!!! Are you serious???

Again, I’m not really upset that they have taken away the .10 cent minimum bid, my problem is that they are not doing it correctly, you can’t expect something to work when your algorithms don’t allow for it. Yahoo needs to fix so many other problems before they start worrying about quality scores and all of that.

Yahoo is reminding me more and more of Ask.com everyday. They need to quit being retarded!

[/END RANT]

I would love to hear your opinions on this recent change that YSM has implement, so please leave a comment letting me know what you think.

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