Easy Earning

Affiliate programs are a brilliant idea. For the owner of the product, they’re a way of ecruiting a veritable army of salespeople to promote your product without having to pay them a dime unless and until they generate a sale. For the affiliate, they’re a great way of earning extra cash from an existing, high-traffic website with virtually zero additional effort.

Only problem is, most affiliates don’t HAVE an existing, high-traffic website and they’re suckered into thinking that it’s a simple matter of signing up for an affiliate program and “driving traffic” to the product owner’s site using a uniquely-coded URL. Well, it IS that simple. And it isn’t.

If you don’t already have your own high-traffic website, how do you think you’re going to drive traffic to the product owner’s site in the hope of generating a sale? Well, there are a few ways, actually. And all of them are going to cost you either time or money.

First off, you’re going to have to spend money on advertising. How much? Well, consider this. Estimates vary but, roughly, only 2-4% of people who see your ad will actually click on your link. Of that 2-4%, only 1% or so of THEM will go on to buy. In addition, it takes, on average, 7 or 8 exposures to your ad before people will click on it. AND to achieve even these piddly numbers your market must be targeted in the first place. This is, as you can see, nothing but a numbers game. Pure and simple.

So what does all this mean to you, the advertiser without a website? Well, to start with you’re going to want to advertise where a LOT of people are going to see your ad. But not just ANY people. People interested in the product you’re wanting to sell - your target market. So this cuts out the free classifieds and FFAs. And it means you’re going to have to spend advertising dollars.

Where do you go to advertise then? The most effective form of advertising is in ezines. Take mine, for example. At the time of writing, my subscriber database is around 14,000. Each week I run an ad for my own opportunity (in addition to running ads from other paying advertisers). I generally get about 500 click-throughs over the course of the 2 or 3 days following publication. That’s a click-through rate of about 3.6%, about in line with the average. If you were to pay to advertise in my ezine, it would cost you $70 for a single classified based on my $5 CPM ($5 per every 1,000 subscribers) pricing formula. This is not an uncommon formula for pricing ezine advertising. You’re therefore paying around 14 cents per click. That’s not bad. Other than that, what can you do? Well, you can choose to spend time rather than money. An obvious choice considering what I’ve just said is to start your OWN ezine. Build your own list and over time you will have a large subscriber database to put your ad in front of too …and it won’t cost you a dime. But this takes time and it takes work. It’s taken me two and a half years to build a list of 14,000 subscribers. And it takes a few hours of work to put together the ezine itself including writing the feature article. Every week, week in, week out. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

And once you’re publishing your own ezine, it’s a simple enough matter to distribute your articles for other ezine publishers to run in their ezines. That 4 or 5 liner at the end telling readers who you are with a link to your website (or, if you don’t have one, the website of the owner of the product you’re selling) is effectively free advertising for you. Not all publishers accept article submissions though, so be sure to find out whether they do before submitting your articles to them.

But think about this. If you’re doing all this work anyway, doesn’t it make sense to create your OWN website (in addition to your ezine)? Sure it takes time and it takes work and it takes money (but not a lot - hosting fees can be pretty cheap if you know where to go). But once it’s done and you’re just in maintenance mode - adding fresh content every few days, uploading your latest ezine and maintaining your archives - your website does so much of the work for you. Generate a few hundred unique visitors a day and you can be getting the same click-through rate to your affiliate site *for nothing* that you were paying someone else 14 cents a click for.

EVERY SINGLE DAY. 24/7/365.

So, this is the truth about affiliate programs. They’re great if you’re the product owner and they’re great if you can link to your affiliate site from your own high-traffic site.

But if you don’t have your own site, you’re going to have to buy traffic to your affiliate site - either with money, time or both. How many sales are you going to have to generate to earn enough commission to more than cover your time and costs and leave you with a profit?

Bottom line? Setting out to make money with affiliate programs before you have your own site in place is putting the cart before the horse. Yes, you want to make money and you want to do it quickly. But it just doesn’t work that way. Not with affiliate programs, anyway. So adjust your expectations and do first steps first. It will be slow going to start. It will take you weeks to create a worthwhile site and then MONTHS to generate the kind of traffic you need. But if you take a long-term approach to your business and take the time now to lay the proper foundation, you’ll reap the dividends for years to come.

ReviewMe, which is a PayPerPost-like service that pays bloggers to write about advertisers’ products, just launched moments ago. The company is backed by TechCrunch-sponsor Text-Link-Ads, which was recently acquired.

ReviewMe has a somewhat different model that PayPerPost. Where advertisers on PayPerPost set a single fee that is paid to all bloggers regardless of their size, ReviewMe uses an algorithm based on Alexa, Technorati and other statistics to determine the importance of a blog and charges a different fee for each blog based on the calculation. Blogger payments range from $30 - $1,000 per post.

Also, Bloggers must disclose that the review is a paid advertisement. They can do this in anyway they choose, ie “The following is a paid review:” “Paid Advertisement:” etc. This is another improvement over PayPerPost, which is heavily criticized because it does not require disclosure.

Finally, advertisers can purchase posts, but they cannot require that a post is positive. The blogger can choose to write their honest opinion without fear of not being paid. The only requirement is that the review must be a minimum of 200 words.

In an email exchange, a company spokesperson said “We are planning on burying PayPerPost.” While we do not endorse this business model, we do note that ReviewMe has removed the most egregious aspects of the PayPerPost business model: no disclosure requirement, and a requirement to write a positive post.

ReviewMe is eating their own dog food by giving away $25,000 today to pay bloggers to write about the service.

Today’s task in the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Project (this is the 2nd last day) is to explore a social media site (whether it be a networking site or a bookmarking one) that you might not have seen or explored previously. I’m not going to tell you which one to choose to explore (because you’ll all have had different experiences of different ones) but will leave that choice up to you (I’ve got a suggested list below of some you might like to choose from).

Social media sites are increasingly popular types of sites and are full of wonderful potential for bloggers wanting to improve their blogs.

Why Should Bloggers Take Notice of Social Media Sites?

Traffic - The most obvious attraction to many of these social sites is the massive number of people that many of these sites have and the potential for them to drive deluges of traffic in your blog’s direction.

However, while I’ve written numerous times on getting and leveraging traffic from social media sites (I’ll include some links at the end of this post) I have increasingly begun to see numerous other benefits of being an active participant in these spaces.

Let me briefly explore a few:

Branding - I wrote a post a month ago on Building Your Personal Brand One ‘Straw’ at a Time which highlighted the power of being involved in a variety of different activities online. In that post I shared an email from a reader telling me how he’d stumbled across me in six different ways before subscribing to my blog - two of these instances were social sites (Facebook and Digg). I’m amazed how many people have told me similar things having come across some of my different pages on social sites.

Reinforcing Relationships - A lot has been written about the nature of ‘friends’ in sites like MySpace where you can rack up thousands of ‘friends’ in a day or two yet ‘know’ none of them. While ‘friendships’ and relationships in these types of sites is usually of a different kind to what happens in ‘real life’ (although there are exceptions) I’ve still found that the interactions that I have on social media sites can reinforce the relationships that I have with readers on my blog. There are a number of readers that I interact with regularly on sites like StumbleUpon and LinkedIn that have led to closer interactions on my blog also.

Learning - I learn a lot about building successful blogs when I participate in social media sites. Spend half an hour stumbling through sites on StumbleUpon and you will learn a lot about how to design sites that immediately capture attention in just second or two (which is all you really have to make an impression on SU), analyze the popular posts at a site like delicious and you’ll see the importance of good headlines (and pick up some tips on how to write them), take some time to go surfing on MySpace and Bebo and you’ll see and learn about all kinds of subcultures that you might not have known much about previously, explore a site like Twitter and you’ll learn the power of conensing a message down into just a handful of words….

How to Use Social Media Sites?

I’m sure that many of you will share other things that a blogger will benefit from as a result of social media sites - but lets take a few moments to share a few tips on HOW to interact on social media sites. The following tips will be fairly general as each site is different - but there are a few principles that remain the same:

Don’t Spam - the temptation with many of these sites is to rush in and plaster links back to your blog all over these sites. However this could lead to you damaging your blog more than it’ll benefit from it. There is a time and place to submit your own blog to many of these sites - however do it as a genuine participant rather than just someone in it for self promotion.

Be an Active Observer - each social bookmarking and networking site that you’ll discover will have it’s own rhythms, language and etiquette. The culture at one site will be quite different to another - so it’s important to take your time in getting to know it and to spend time familiarizing yourself with it. Watch how it operates, analyze what type of people use it, get a feel for how people interact with one another and the content, see what people respond to and make note of how other people are using the site in productive ways. Out of these observations you’ll be in a much better position to see opportunities to participate in fruitful ways.

Be a Genuine and Generous Participant - once you’ve got a feel for the site create a profile and begin to participate. Building on my tip ‘don’t spam’ - I’d encourage you to spend as much time as possible using the site in a completely non self serving way. If it’s a bookmarking site - bookmark other sites (ones you have a genuine interest in), if it’s a networking site - interact with people in a real and friendly manner. While you should find ways to build your own profile, brand and authority - these things generally come in time as you naturally participate rather than by always pushing the boundaries and manipulating the system.

Look for Tour Guides - every social media site has it’s key and central participants who can help you to understand and know how to use these sites most effectively. Look for these ‘tour guides’, watch how they operate, emulate them, befriend them, help them achieve their goals and in time build a relationship with them. In doing so you’ll learn a lot, begin to understand the language and culture of the site and will grow in your own influence in it.

If you have more tips on how to use these sites best - feel free to give tips below.

Social Media Sites to Explore:

There are hundreds and hundreds of these types of sites popping up and I can’t possibly mention them all. Let me suggest a few (with links to my own profile where I use them more actively so we can become ‘friends’):

• StumbleUpon
• MySpace
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• MyBlogLog
• Bebo
• Delicious
• Digg
• Furl
• Reddit
• Netscape
• Spurl
• Blue Dot
• Ma.gnolia
• Flickr
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Sphinn
• Newsvine

Of course there are literally hundreds of others - many now appearing on specific smaller niches. Feel free to suggest the ones that you’re experimenting with in comments below.

Virgin Money has become the latest in a string of service providers to withdraw from the UK affiliate market.

Originally running on the Online Media Group (OMG) network, Virgin Money have suddenly and without notice withdrawn their car, home, pet and travel Insurance products.

The move comes as other insurance companies re-organise or withdraw entirely from affiliate marketing.

Earlier this month, Sheila’s Wheels, First Alternative and Click4Group closed all of their affiliate marketing. Norwich Union also began downsizing its own affiliate marketing campaigns, following suit from Lloyds TSB.

The withdrawal comes on the heels of a shift at the end of last year, which saw a large number of providers in the financial services sector move their affiliate marketing campaign from Tradedoubler to rival providers, especially to OMG and Buy.at.

The reason for the closures is likely rooted in the credit crunch, as marketing departments are forced to rethink their strategies in the face of threatened budgets.

Certainly over the past year many major insurance brands have looked to “search engine optimisation” (SEO) as a potentially more cost-effective marketing solution.

SEO involves helping rank companies more competitively for their core products and services on Google’s natural search results, as opposed to the paid for Adwords results.

Many internet-based financial services companies have been chasing aggressive SEO strategies for years, not least due to the strong return on investment it can provide.

However, the problem for many traditional insurance companies is they lack experience for distinguishing which SEO companies are capable of delivering strong results.

While branded SEO companies may be able to promise results, very few have been able to deliver any significant positive benefits.

Even worse, some insurance providers, such as Gocompare and Kwik Fit insurance, have both suffered penalties in Google’s search results due to questionable SEO practices.

According to Rory DeNiro, managing director of SEO company BruceClayEurope, which has a track-record of successful corporate SEO strategy, the problem is one of finding a competitive advantage.

“When everybody is making their websites search engine friendly, no one is remarkable to Google,” said Rory.

“Only those [financial services] companies that are able to apply more innovative strategies, such as off-site optimisation via ethical link building and engaging the social web, will be truly able to tap into the vast lead generation potential that Google’s natural search results offer.”

In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether other insurance providers will also remove themselves from affiliate marketing, or else downsize their affiliate marketing campaigns.

The word affiliate, for those who has been a user of internet might be already become a familiar word. Affiliate marketing basically is a kind of promotion in the internet where a business is promoted or being published by another party (another website).

There are at least two sides in affiliate marketing. The merchant is the one who has the business or something to sell and need to be promoted. The affiliate, in the other side, is the one who own a website where the business will be promoted.

The concept of affiliate marketing is, the merchant will pay the affiliate marketer when the certain goal is accomplished. The goal can be anything. For example: leads generation, getting conversions, getting feedback, accumulating data or anything at all.

By doing this it brings a lot of benefits both for advertiser (merchant) and the affiliate marketer. For merchants this is reduces the amount of investment for promotion purpose. This is also giving more return of investment.

In the other hand, it is good for money making for the affiliate. There is no investment or cost involved. The only thing affiliate marketers need is traffic, and managing the traffic.

Nowadays there are many different kinds of affiliate marketing. If you see Clickbooth Affiliate Network, it is also an example of well developed affiliate marketing site.

The modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business is a popular method of promoting Internet businesses called affiliate marketing. An affiliate marketer is paid for every visitor, subscriber, or customer provided to an Internet business because of his efforts. The affiliate marketer earns compensation based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.

The modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business is a popular method of promoting Internet businesses called affiliate marketing. An affiliate marketer is paid for every visitor, subscriber, or customer provided to an Internet business because of his efforts. The affiliate marketer earns compensation based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.

Right now there is a lot of debate about the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of automatically generated web pages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of search engine optimizing their sites. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic Search Engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users.

Anne Kadet, Senior Writer at SmartMoney magazine, wrote an article in the May 2008 issue where she lambasted affiliate marketing.

The article, “A Penny For Your Clicks? Affiliate marketing: So easy, even our dog could do it,” sets the stage by quoting Jason Calacanis when he delivered the keynote at Affiliate Summit 2008 West.

As reported by Anne, Jason said, “Affiliate marketing is bull****.” But she neglected to mention that this was met by laughter, and he then followed with “That’s what you all expect me to do. I’m not going to do that.”

The crowd got the joke. Kadet clearly did not.

Jason came on the GeekCast show a couple weeks later and commented on the opening line from his keynote, “Isn’t it amazing how you can say something and everybody in the audience laughs, it’s a huge joke, and then people write it as fact?”

The Anne Kadet article continues… “He went on to call the attendees ‘the bottom of the food chain’ with a ‘Lex Luthor mind-set.’”

But she neglects that he repeatedly pointed out that he wasn’t addressing the whole industry in this fashion, but rather the “thin affiliates.”

Kadet also explains that affiliate marketing “often takes the form of promotional text links buried in sham product “reviews,” blog posts and email spam.”

Now I don’t think anybody is pretending that all affiliates are good. There are bad actors here, just like any other industry.

But I think to paint affiliate marketing with such a broad brush is intellectually dishonest at best.

Another part of the article that I had an issue with was a purported quote from me:

Shawn Collins, the affiliate marketing guru who organized the conference, says his industry isn’t all bad.

OK, I introduced myself as the Co-founder of Affiliate Summit, not a guru that organized the whole thing.

And I stated that the thin affiliates that Jason Calacanis mentioned were a minority, and not at all representative of the affiliate marketing space.

Nice spin, Anne.

She also lamented that “it’s tough to earn affiliate marketing cash the honest way,” because she put up ads for Wal-Mart and PetSmart.com on her blog for three weeks and didn’t earn anything.

Newsflash - it is hard to earn an honest buck. Many variables contributed to your failure. You could have reached out and asked me for tips - you have my number.

But that would not have fit your slam on affiliate marketing, would it?

Anne, have a look at my highlights of the Jason Calacanis keynote for the parts you clearly missed.

My business partner, Missy Ward, also shares her perspective on your article.

By the way, I’m sure you didn’t notice this, but shortly after Affiliate Summit, Jason Calacanis started incorporating affiliate links at Mahalo.com and was pleased with the results.

While potential partnerships with American Airlines and Continental Airlines are still reportedly under discussion for the airline, British Airways announced a different deal earlier this week. It awarded LinkShare and TradeDoubler management of its worldwide affiliate marketing program.

LinkShare will manage the airline’s program in the Americas and Asia Pacific region, while TradeDoubler will manage the European and African regions. Both companies will work as joint affiliate partners for the airline in the UK.

LinkShare and TradeDoubler will work closely with Agency.com, the airline’s digital media planning and buying agency, on the program.

“I think it’s actually a great partnership for both British Airways and LinkShare,” said Liane Dietrich, UK managing director of LinkShare. “They have shown that they – as an online marketer – recognize the value that affiliate marketing can bring.”

LinkShare, a New York-based division of Tokyo-based Rakuten, started working with British Airways on a pre-launch of the program several months ago, Dietrich said. The program went live in April, she added.

Before striking a deal with LinkShare and TradeDoubler, British Airways was using a different company for its affiliate marketing program, Dietrich said. She declined to name the other company. TradeDoubler and British Airways did not respond in time to press inquiries.

“Affiliate marketing is a fundamental part of our online strategy, said Eve Ireland, online partnerships manager at British Airways, in a statement. “When looking at potential partners, our objective was to identify a company that could help us maximize channel efficiencies and drive innovation from both a technical and a strategic perspective.”