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Affiliate marketing can be a double-edged sword for bloggers. Handled correctly, it can create enormous revenue for both you and your affiliate partner, and even increase traffic numbers for your blog for great marketing success. In the wrong hands, an affiliate marketing campaign can destroy your blog’s credibility, aggravate your partners and drive down your blog’s ranking in search engine results. For the uninitiated, a quick definition: essentially, affiliate marketing is the process of driving “leads,” or traffic, from your blog to the site of your affiliate partner. You’ll get paid when your visitors either click your affiliate links (known as PPC – pay-per-click), or when they click your affiliate links before taking some kind of action (known as PPA – pay-per-action) at your partner’s site. This action may be anything from signing up for an email newsletter to actually purchasing a product.
Regardless of the payment system your chosen affiliate program decides to use, you’ll need to be creative if you hope to make money while preserving your blog’s feel, flavor and integrity. Here are seven things to keep in mind for affiliate marketing success:
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Identifying Your Audience
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Research Your Niche Market Keywords.
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Analyze the Competition
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Research Industry Trends
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Decide if You Want to Enter the Niche Market
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No Need to Create Your Own Product
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Don’t Pick Just Any Niche
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No Time Requirement for Customer Service
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5 reasons why you should use aweber to build your blog’s email list 16
Reference
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If you are an early stage entrepreneur looking to start a viable business in a market you are passionate about, rather than focusing on what product you want to sell, start first with understanding your audience. Why should you concentrate on a niche audience first, instead of products? According to Chris Ducker, outsourcing guru and Internet business entrepreneur, there are two solid reasons to prioritize finding an audience to promote to over identifying products to promote: Products come and go, but niche audiences stick around forever. If you’ve ever been promoting a product profitably and then had it decline in popularity (or pulled off the market entirely), you know what I’m talking about. When you choose a niche audience and take the time to understand their needs deeply, a whole new world of options open up to you. You switch from struggling to find ideas for products, to instantly knowing exactly the types of products you should be promoting – because they’re in tune with your niche audience’s needs. While his advice is geared towards affiliate marketers who earn commission from products they promote online, it’s great advice for any entrepreneur seeking to better connect with a targeted audience of customers who have both the inclination to buy AND the capacity to pay. Some novice affiliate bloggers make the mistake of thinking that they have to start running their sites like advertising portals, just because they signed up with an affiliate program. Although pushing a hard sell is an effective tactic in some industries, it won’t go over well with your traffic.
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ď ś Many affiliate bloggers take the strategy of writing reviews about the products sold by their partners. While this strategy certainly works (remember, internet readers love reviews), it needs to be handled carefully and honestly. It will look very fishy to your audience if all of your reviews are glowingly positive, never finding fault in a single product or service you review. Try to be as fair and unbiased as possible when discussing the items sold by your affiliate partner. People are very comfortable with buying imperfect products, so long as they still seem like a good overall value. Playing this angle will encourage your readers to click your affiliate links rather than assuming that you sold out.
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In this step, you want to identify what keywords your audience uses when they research topics related to this niche market, especially searches related to their problems, pain points or deepest desires. This information will not only tell you what topics your audience cares about the most, it will tell you whether or not there is enough profit potential in this niche. A fun and easy too to start with is the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can use it to identify the keywords your audience is using to research products, services, solutions, and information related to this niche market. The tool provides lots of useful data related to these keywords (especially if you use this tool while logged into your Google Adwords account) such as local and global search volume, level of competition, average cost per click (CPC) and more. What we want to pay attention when we research industry keywords is the monthly search volume. The higher the search volume, the bigger the market. As a rule of thumb, anything over 1,000 exact match searches a month is worth looking into. However, there are some niche markets with smaller monthly volume that have profit potential as well, especially if the market is hungry, and there isn’t a lot of competition.
Let’s take the personal development market. Within this market, at 49,500 exact match searches a month, globally, this is a sizeable segment of people interested in all things related to the Law of Attraction.
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SEO is a big part of any affiliate marketing campaign, and the necessity of choosing targeted, search-friendly keywords is no exception. Let’s say your niche is streaming media services. People love lists, reviews and comparisons, so keyword phases like “Top 5 Online Video Services,” “Netflix vs. Hulu Plus” and “Pros and Cons of VuDu Online Movie Service” would all be excellent options. As with the rest of your content, it’s important to vary your keyword phrases and avoid stuffing them too heavily in your posts.
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The level and quality of competition in a niche is a good indication whether the niche is lucrative or not. The most lucrative keyword niches, are typically characterized by:
High average cost per click (CPC) Multiple pages of ads Advertisers in the top 3 premium positions Ads that are highly targeted to the search keyword While the Law of Attraction niche is pretty sizeable, competition appears to be medium to low, and with the average CPC less than $1.
This raises the question of whether or not this niche has enough money in it to make it worthwhile to establish a business there. The best way to get an idea is to see if there are any pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers bidding on “law of attraction” keywords in Google Adwords. Google Adwords ads are the text ads that appear at the top and on the right side bar areas of Google search results pages.As you can see, while there are a lot of competing pages in the organic search results area, this high key phrase is devoid of PPC advertisers. The lack of PPC advertisers suggests that this key phrase isn’t particularly lucrative and that the law of attraction may be a tough market to make money in. At 48 million competing pages, it will be extremely tough for you to launch a new website and rank on Google page 1 for the term “law of attraction.” Chances are, it won’t be worth your time.
Not to say that it isn’t a profitable niche. Asking yourself why no one is advertising will yield a lot of insight. A great way to find answers are in the list of keyword suggestions presented by the Google Keyword Tool. Are most people looking for Law of Attraction books? Could it be that most people are looking 7|
for free information. Beyond the book, are there other kinds of products this target audience would actually buy? Coaching? Courses? At this point it may be worthwhile drilling down to long tail keywords related to the the niche market’s pain points and desires. For example, people who believe in the Law of Attraction, are finding it’s not working that well for them and are seeking help in unleashing its full potential. You can see here that there are advertisers in this keyword niche, which suggests there is money to be made. However, the number and quality of the ads and advertisers suggest that “law of attraction courses” is not a hyper competitive market, and that there may be room to accommodate new players. However, just to be sure, it’s good to circle back to the Google keyword tool and see if there is enough search volume for this keyword niche to support a viable business. With only 36 exact match global searches a month, it would be tough to build a business focusing solely on selling a Law of Attraction course
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It is also important to make sure you research the latest industry trends to find out the performance of the niche market that you would like to get involved in. There are some tools that you can use for this and a great example is Google Trends. This can save you from a lot of headache as you can be able to find out the niche markets that are on a constant decline so that you can steer clear from this. This will also help you to identify a growing market that you can establish yourself in, to develop in the proper way. As you can see, interest in Law of Attraction peaked in 2007 and has been on a steady decline ever since. This indicates that it is a declining market. This means, it will be increasingly difficult for you to grow traffic to your website, if overall traffic in that niche is shrinking. If you want your business to be a long term business, it’s better to establish yourself in a market that is growing or at least relatively stable, rather start your business in a pie that’s shrinking. Even if your site does have plenty of traffic, it doesn’t mean they’ll automatically click your affiliate links. And even if you’re utilizing a PPA payment arrangement, you should still be shooting for the highest conversion rate possible. This means placing some emphasis on your affiliate links without making it too obvious that you’re doing so in exchange for a payment. Your traffic should be able to find your affiliate links without too much scrolling. It’s also important that you vary the style of your links, with some being in-line anchor text and others taking the form of buttons or even banners. Adding some interesting photos and keeping articles short and punchy should help as well.
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At this point, you’ll need to decide if the market is worth getting into. As mentioned before, the Law of Attraction courses sub niche indicates profit potential, but not a lot of competition. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show a high enough monthly search volume to be viable on its own. As a rule of thumb, if you see a ton of highly targeted ads at the top and in the right side bar, on multiple pages, with the top brands in the market consistently in the 3 premium spots, it will probably be tough to break into that market as a newbie. You’d be up against established brands with large marketing budgets. That being said, there may be other profitable long tail keywords (thus audiences) in the Law of Attraction market that you can target. It’s up to you to drill down into the niche to identify what profitable keywords exist and what services, products and solutions this market might be eager to pay for. So if you are determined to be in the Law of Attraction market, the solution would be to establish a web presence around a less competitive keyword, and go after the audience associated with that niche market.
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More people than ever buy products online, but the main thing to consider is whether you want to sell a tangible product or a virtual product. As with selling a service, you must first determine whether a market exists for your product. Look at similar products then decide whether there's room for another player. All products will have to be sold through a website, from which an order can be taken and a payment can be processed. If you have the knowledge and necessary skills, you can easily build the website yourself. Otherwise you will have to pay a professional. A tangible product is something that can be held in the hand, therefore it will also need to be packed and shipped. Processing orders is very time consuming, but more importantly you may have to keep inventory, which can be very expensive plus you'll need to find storage space. An alternative is to sell virtual products. These include downloadable e-books, videos and information products. You'll still need a website with ordering and credit card processing facilities, but you will not need to keep any inventory and it won't take up any space (except on your computer's hard drive) Many successful Internet marketers use this method to maximum effect. Creating your own digital product is also a great way to monetize a blog. However, creating your own product can take a lot of time, and that is something many bloggers don’t have. Probably the number one benefit of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to dedicate any time at all to creating a product. Someone else dedicates countless hours into creating their product, and as an affiliate you can start promoting it right away, and you’ll get a commission for every sale you refer. 11 |
And with digital products you commission as an affiliate is usually pretty substantial. For example, you may get a 50% commission for each sale you make. In this case you’re making as much from each sale as the person who dedicated many hours to create the product! Without the need to dedicate the time to create the product it’s possible for you to promote a greater variety and quantity of products as an affiliate than you would be able to create on your own.Unless you have a well-developed skill such as, web design, graphics design, writing or some other creative or artistic flair, you'll have to concentrate on finding or creating a product. In selling your services, you must first determine whether a paying market actually exists for your services. Initially, you'll need to do some research and look at similar services being offered. A good indicator is usually when there are numerous similar services available. This would suggest a buoyant market, but it's not always the case. A friendly yet inquisitive email sent to a few established service providers in the business you're considering, should give you an insight. Take a good look at the existing competition. Look at the quality of their work. Could you do it better? What prices are they charging? Could you do it cheaper? If you can effectively do either of these you're on your way to building online wealth.
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Not only will you not have to dedicate time up front to create the product, but as an affiliate you can also avoid the need to dedicate time on an on-going basis for customer service. The amount of time needed for customer service will vary depending on the type of the product, but some product creators/sellers need to dedicate serious amounts of time and/or money to be able to effectively support their product. Some of the most popular, and potentially lucrative, products to create include software, WordPress themes, and WordPress plugins. While it is possible for product creators to make plenty of money with these types of products, they tend to also require a major commitment to provide adequate support for customers. As an affiliate you won’t be responsible to provide customer service or support, you’ll just make the referral and once the sale is made support will be the seller’s responsibility.
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As you’re browsing through affiliate marketing programs, it may be tempting to choose whatever you think will be most profitable, or whatever seems like it will attract the most traffic. While these are important factors to keep in mind, your top priority should be choosing a niche that’s closely related to your existing subject matter. Let’s say your blog focuses on emerging portable technologies, such as smart phones and tablet PCs. Selecting affiliate marketing programs offered by wireless internet providers would make an excellent fit, since you’ll easily be able to work affiliate-related keywords and anchor text into your existing content, as well as the content you’ll naturally develop in the future. Step one is doing your homework: research the blogs in your niche. Learn the lay of the land. Find out who the players are in your space. Do all the research that you can. Google and other search engines are great for learning everything from how old the blogs are to who founded them, what kind of money are the generating, etc. Next, make a list of the most popular blogs in your niche and study them closely. At the end of the day, it’s all been done. There is not any reason to try to reinvent the wheel here. Just look at what other people are doing and copy what works, while placing your own personal spin on it.
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Get to know the most successful authors in your space. Read their blog, post comments, be part of the discussion. The more interactive you can become on their site(s) the better. Sooner or later, you will become known and that will lead people to becoming curious about you and what you have to say and ultimately lead people back to your blog. Increased presence means increased traffic which means increased revenue. For you. Now go out there and do it! Get in the game people! You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
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1. Instant eBook delivery When one subscribe by email he get an instant thank you response sent to his email with the eBook attached. You can also set it so the subscriber is redirected to a “thank you” page on your blog where you can either promote other offers or get them to interact with the blog in a different way. There are a few reasons why this is important
Instant promotion People want things fast. They don’t like waiting. With this technology you can send them the eBook straight away and in your ad copy you can tell them that it is instant. This is very important.
Less work Subscribers get an email with the eBook instantly as well as a redirect to a “thank you” page where you explain that their stuff is on the way.
More professional The way Aweber works looks extremely professional. There is very little room for confusion and it really looks like you are running a tight ship.
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2. Automatic follow up messages to develop the relationship
Your readers are extremely important to you. Each and every one. So you’ll realize that Aweber allows you to automatically send out follow up emails to your subscribers after a set amount of days or weeks you’ll realized what a powerful opportunity it would be to develop the relationship further.
3. Ability to earn more money How? Let’s say you run a blog about dog training. You give away a free eBook called Teach Your Dog to Sit to anyone who signs on to your list. You then head into your Aweber dashboard and set up a few follow ups. The first follow up is another free dog training lesson, perhaps about how to get your dog to stay. Make sure it is packed full of value. Then a few days later send out another free lesson. A day later send out another email with another dog training guide, this time priced at $49. It could be your complete guide or another must have product. You now have a constant and fully automated stream of income. Let’s look at some numbers:
You get 10 email subscribers per day
You have a 10% unsubscribe rate
9 subscribers see the final email 17 |
You convert about 20%
You make $49 per day
$49 x 365 days in a year = $17,885
You get the drift? The numbers are a bit rough (you might convert less) but it is the idea behind it that works. You don’t even have to have your own product. As long as you are providing your readers with high quality products that you use yourself then you are going to be adding value to their lives. And that is a vital element of making a sale. Aweber allows you to do all this without touching a thing.
4. High converting email submit forms you can cut and paste
This is a very cool feature if you have zero coding experience. You just design the widget and copy and paste it into your blog’s sidebar.
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5. The ability to track, split test and tweak
Some of the things they let you do include:
Name your ads and track which one works best You can give each one a different name in your Aweber dashboard (popup, form, single post, front page) and you can track which one is working best for you. Thrilling!
Test emails before you send them The above screen shot is from the little pop up window you get when you click “TEST”. This feature allows you to send out an email to yourself to make sure everything looks right before you send it.
Split test two ads at once The coolest thing since sliced bread. You can create two forms with different colors, images or even products and run them at the same time and see which converts best. Sometimes split testing really surprises you as people often go for things you would never have imagined.
Get an email every time you get a subscriber With Aweber you can opt to get an email every time someone signs up complete with the form name in the subject heading. 19 |
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