Prospecting Affiliates- The Advertiser’s Role

If you have a product and your main source of revenue comes from affiliate’s promoting your product on their website then how should you go about identifying the best placement for your product on their site? This also goes along with prospecting because essentially you are prospecting affiliate’s to promote your product. You can’t just expect that the affiliate will be willing to spend time to think about where the best place to promote your product is? They’re busy! As an advertiser, the affiliate expects you to approach them with an idea of how and where to promote your product.

Things you might want to look at:

As an advertiser you have to think about the best possible places to promote your product on the affiliate’s website. There are many areas in which a product or service can be promoted on a website. The easiest way for an affiliate to promote your product is through a banner or link on their webpage that links back to your site or landing page. Another very easy way for a publisher to promote your product is through email marketing. Some publishers prefer to promote products via pay-per-click marketing. The latter can be fairly expensive if the affiliate is not experienced in this practice of marekting.

One of the best and most effective means of promoting a product or service is through a customer path… especially if the customer has already made a purchase or completed a desired action such as signing up for a newsletter .

Good touch points for the new advertiser could be :

• Confirmation/Thank you Page
• Member’s Area
• Exit pop
• Co-reg

Creating your project. Things to identify when approaching potential affiliates to promote your product/service.

1. Customer path- what is the exact path that each customer goes through when visiting the affiliate’s page? You should go through this just like a customer. Remember to write down every URL that you visit through your customer experience. Take a screen shot of each page so that it can be evaluated later and so that you can make recommendations to the affiliate. Mozilla Firefox has a free screen capture service AddOn. However, I personally like to use Snagit because it allows me to send to PowerPoint. From that point you can document the exact path and then create machups right from PP.

When evaluating the customer path, be sure to answer these questions: could your product/service benefit or compliment the customer who signed up for the initial product? If yes, then, how?  If you decide that your product or service is a good fit then you need to next identify the “where” piece of the equation. Where would be the best more relevent placement for your product within the affiliate’s website?

How much information is already on the confirmation page? How can you pitch the product or service so that it 1) Fits with the current product or service 2) Offers a benefit to the consumer 3)Teaches the customer something they don’t already know

There are so many ways to promote an affiliate product. It’s overwhelming, but if you get it right then rinse, repeat, rinse repeat. Affiliates do it all the time! It’s time that the advertiser steps with suggestions!

-Rant Over. AffiliateGeek Out!

Content Management 911

My Twitter addiction is starting to get the best of me. Well, really, it’s not the Twitter Addiction but more the Content Addiction that is getting the best of me. hahaha… Actually, I could even take this a step farther and say that it’s not the Twitter nor the Content that is addicting but better yet it’s the Action/Reaction Factor. (Maybe this blog should be called “Action/Reaction Factor”) Hahaha… You know what I mean though. (I made that a period b/c if you’re reading this blog then you KNOW what I mean about the “Action/Reaction Factor”.) That’s when you find an awesome piece of content, a website or product, track it with something like tinyurl, Adminder or bit.ly,  find traffic willing to click the link and then hit REFRESH over and over and over again. It’s sooo addicting!

The “Action/Reaction Factor” leads me to my next thought (which is why I started writing this blog in the first place). Social Media is such a blast especially Twitter and Facebook. I really never utilized Facebook until I discovered that I could submit and retrieve status updates on my Blackberry. After that, I was addicted. Oh boy… and then came Twitter. Holy crap. I had heard of Twitter but never really played with the tool much. But then… one of my coworkers was given a project that was to figure out how to best use Twitter at an Internet marketing company. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that experiment. Seriously! So I started Tweeting. Now, I’m officially addicted to social media. I want to learn everthing I possibly can about the subject. Just like right now… I should be getting ready for bed and instead I am blogging about social media.

Pretty much… social media, blogging and seeing my stats go up are all I can think about. And then there’s all of the resources and content. What the hell do you do with it all? I mean… every five seconds I find ANOTHER great article about SEO, SEM, Contextual Advertising, PPV, PPC, Email Marketing, Direct Marketing anything and everything necessary to become an expert in the field on Internet Marketing. How in the world do people organize all of their content? I find article after article that just rocks my socks. Should you organize it via website? Should you organize it via topic? Should the content be organized by source and then by topic? What would be the best category names? I don’t even know… All of this information is making me loony. I love it!!!

Seriously though… if you have some ideas about how to best organize Favorites, Bookmarks and Content then please do leave a comment or send me an email.  You would be in my favorites 4-ever. >> Cheesy I know.

Popunder Traffic

According to Dictionary.com Pop-under Traffic is defined as: “on a Web site, an ad that opens in a separate window and is temporarily hidden until the user leaves the original Web site”

There are many companies on the world-wide-web that offer popunder traffic. Just like any type of advertising there are pro’s and con’s of the traffic source. Click here to get the pro’s and con’s of popunder traffic.

Below is a list of companies that offer pop-under traffic:

Adminder.com

What are the different types of pop-under traffic: tool bar traffic, redirect traffic, expired domain traffic.

Here are some sites that can guide you to information about pop-under traffic.

Tamingthebeast.net

Affiliate Marketing Books

As an Affiliate Manager, what does it mean to be an expert in the field of Affiliate Marketing? How knowledgeable should one be on the subjects of Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Email Marketing, Contextual Advertising, Pay-Per-View (PPV) etc. So much to know. So many resources. The world wide web offers information overload to anyone willing to listen.

Project of the Day: Find a book about Affiliate Marketing. Check resources Barnes and Noble and Books A Million since those stores are located in Denver. List findings.

Barnes and Nobles: http://bitly.com/HQiQb

The Super Affiliate Handbook, 4 Hour Work Week

Marketing & SEO with Song Lyrics

Know when to Hold’em… Know when to Fold’em… Know when to walk away… Know when to run. Lol. (Please play this song while you read my blog. The Gambler- Kenny Rogers)

It’s interesting to examine the sites that Google associates to just the title of my blog, “Know when to hold’em, Know when to fold’em…” Since I only knew the lyrics to this song by Kenny Rogers I decided to do a Google search to see if I could find the name of the song. To my surprise, I found that many blog sites were using the lyrics to this song as well.

Blogs with the Know when to Hold’em, Know when to Fold’em lyrics included topics such as dating, poker, job-search management, Investing, Internet Marketing and a few other topics that I don’t have time to mention.

So, looks like I’m going to create a project around trying to get ranked in Google by using song lyrics as blog post titles or in the meta tags. Hmmm… I wonder if there is a website that talks about this method anywhere. Seems like this would be considered. SEO.