June 2009

Who should an affiliate site benefit?

by Joe Sousa on June 30, 2009

in Affiliate Stuff

Who should an affiliate site benefit?

 

Building an affiliate site is easy. Building a good affiliate site is another story. Nearly anybody can slap up a site, throw on a few affiliate links and call it good. But sites like that will rarely make any sort of serious money.

 

A quality affiliate site will be beneficial to the customer, to the merchants, and to the affiliate.

 

Beneficial to the customer:  A good affiliate site should be able to benefit the customer and be a site that is useful to the customer. This can be done in a number of ways:

  • Give the customer what they are looking for – When someone does a search for something it should be easy for them to find what they are looking for. If they are searching for “nascar jackets” and you deliver a site that sells NASCAR jackets you are helping them.

  • Give the user content they can’t find elsewhere -  Product information and reviews are a good way to do this. Give the customer some original content about a product they can only find on your site.

  • Aggregate content – Rather than having a customer visit multiple sites for the information they are looking for you can aggregate that content onto one site.  Embedding videos, articles, having multiple products available, price comparisons, etc. are a good way to do this.  If you can make your site a one stop site for your niche there is less chance the customer will go elsewhere to look for information.

  • Provide something useful to the customer – You want the customer to get some use out of your site and give the customer a reason to buy from you. It could be a coupon or deal, something explaining the benefits of a product, a recipe if you have a cooking site, show how to use a product properly, an interview with an expert in that particular niche, etc.  There are dozens and dozens of useful ideas you can give a customer or something that will help the customer. Try to do more than just give a link.

  • Solve a problem for the customer – When a customer has a problem and they find your site and can get a solution to the problem that is a great benefit to them. “How to…” articles are great for this. If someone has a problem like “Whenever I cook chicken it is always too dry and rubbery” and you give them a good recipe or tips on how to cook moist chicken that solves their problem and they are probably very thankful to find a tip like that.

Beneficial to the merchant: A good affiliate site should be beneficial to the merchant. If it isn’t beneficial why would they even have an affiliate program? Good merchants know the value quality affiliates can bring and should be more than willing to help affiliates as the affiliates help them. How can an affiliate benefit a merchant?
  • Provide quality traffic – Merchants are looking to make sales. Affiliates are looking to make money. The more quality traffic that an affiliate generates the more beneficial they are to the merchant.
  • Presell the customer – Let’s say a merchant regularly converts 1% of the visitors to their site. If an affiliate is doing a good job of preselling the customer and convincing them they need to buy this product and the traffic from that affiliate ends up converting at 5% that is very beneficial to the merchant.
  • Access customers the merchant wouldn’t normally see – A merchant’s main job should be to sell stuff. Most merchants aren’t experts in SEO, PPC, social media, video, etc. Quality affiliates will be able to drive traffic using many of those methods and it will allow the merchant to focus on what they do best.
  • Provide a greater reach for the merchant – Let’s say a merchant who sells grills and barbecues is doing a good job on their site and they have some good search engine listings for some keywords like “gas grills”, “charcoal bbq”, and some of the bigger keywords in that niche. If they just stick with those big keywords they are missing out on a huge portion of their potential traffic. They could have affiliates that have some niche sites focused on a specific type of grill, sites with bbq recipes, a site dealing with backyard patios, a site dealing with grilling pork, and dozens of other niches driving traffic to them that they wouldn’t normally get. That expands their potential traffic from just a few general keywords to thousands of more targeted keywords

Beneficial to the affiliate: Affiliates are there to make money. Yeah, they might say that they want to help customers, provide something useful to the customer, and other grand philosophical ideals but in the end if the site doesn’t make money it is pretty useless as an affiliate site. I’m not saying you can’t use those great ideas to drive customers and make money. Some of the best sites out there don’t seem like they are out there for the $$ but money is what drives the vast majority of affiliates. But on the flip side the more you help the customers, the more you can relate to them and connect with them, the more “good stuff” you do for the customers the more money you will make.

Personally I wouldn’t build an affiliate site if I didn’t think it would make money. There are plenty of other sites I might build without a goal of directly making money and those sites are great but if I build an affiliate site I want to see some $$ come out of it.

Finding a customer need and filling it is one of the time tested methods of selling stuff. If you have a site dealing with baby strollers and you see that there is a great need out there for someone to put the strollers through torture tests (like Dwight did on The Office) and you take a bunch of strollers, beat the crap out of them and then let the customers know what the best results are and which stroller holds up the best you are providing a very valuable service to the customer but also you will have a very good chance of convincing that customer they need to buy a certain stroller. In a case like that you are providing a great service to the customer but in the end the goal there is to make the sale and get the commission

Or if you see that people want to know what the sharpest pair of scissors is and you go out and test out a bunch of scissors, pull in some reviews from other sites, give the customer a coupon so they can save on their scissors you are idealistically being very helpful to those customers but in the end you are still trying to drive that sale.

So when building an affiliate site all 3 of these should be present. There are hundreds of sites out there I can think of that fill all these needs and many of them are very, very profitable. If you can build a site that benefits the customer, the merchant, and the affiliate your site should end up being successful.

Any comments? Am I missing something? Do you have anything you can add? Please leave a comment below and let me know.

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First 2 sites for my Intern

by Joe Sousa on June 29, 2009

in Affiliate Stuff

Well, it has been about 3 weeks or so that I have been working with my intern, Seth Weber. We spent the first couple weeks going over some of the basics of affiliate marketing and last week we got started building some sites.

To start out we chose a niche I have worked in for years and have had some good success with on a number of other sites I have built in the past. I figured this would be a good way for Seth to get his feet wet in building a site, utilizing affiliate links, working with some basic HTML, cleaning up datafeeds, and other stuff that goes into building a decent affiliate site.

What we did was take a site I already had built, stripped it down, and use it as a template for these new sites.  They are a pretty standard datafeed type of site with around 1000 and 1700 pages of different products and based on my past experience they should get some OK traffic and make a few sales a week. If we can get these sites pulling in somehwere in the range of $300-500 a month I would be very pleased.

To build the datafeed portion of the site we used a server side script we developed a few years ago. I had used a couple different datafeed options in the past and was never pleased with them so we just built one ourselves. The problem I had with most of them was the pages would build on my computer and I would have to upload them which could take a long time for bigger sites. Invariably there would be something wrong with the template so I would have to rebuild the pages, upload them again, find more problems, upload again, etc. and that took way too long for my liking.  With our current system I can just make a change to the template, upload it, and rebuild the site on the server in a matter of seconds as opposed to 30 minutes to an hour.  Much more efficient.

Once Seth gets more comfortable working with these sites and the datafeeds it shouldn’t take much more than an hour or two to crank out a new site so we will keep building these over the summer along with some other sites and niches we have in mind.

The two sites we have built so far are Alabama Fan Gear and Georgia Fan Gear.  Eventually we hope to have sites for 100 or more colleges.  Even if they can each average $100 or so a month that will be some pretty good money. We are working with Football Fanatics as our merchant.  I have worked with them for many years now and they are a great affiliate program to work with. Check them out if you are looking for the best sports merchandise merchant out there.

Like I said earlier these sites aren’t necessarily finished product. There are a couple small things we need to change on them but for the most part they are ready to go.

So what do you think? See any glaring problems with these sites? Anything we can add? Any suggestions? Leave a comment and let Seth and I know.  Also if you want to link to the sites that would be fine also. :)

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Affiliate Marketing 101 – Week 2

by Joe Sousa on June 9, 2009

in Uncategorized

If you missed the first week of training I gave Seth, my intern, you can check it out at http://whatdoesjoethink.com/2009/06/affiliate-marketing-week-1/.  During week 1 we went over some of the basics of affiliate marketing.  For week 2 we looked at how to find a niche, how do to some keyword research, and what to look for when starting an affiliate site. Here is what we went over:

How to choose a niche – Choosing the right products or niche in affiliate marketing is a HUGE key to success. There are many, many factors to consider when looking at what type of site to build, what markets to target, which merchants to work with, etc.

 

In many ways it will be a balancing act. Obviously in some markets there can be millions of dollars to be made per month but those markets will be much harder to crack than one that might only bring in a couple hundred a month.  If you want to put forth the time and effort to succeed in those big markets you can see some great rewards but for the most part I would recommend staying away from them and focus your time and effort on some smaller niches.

 

Here are a few of the factors to consider and some tools to help make the job a bit easier:

 

  • Research – Research is key. Would you ever start a real business with out doing your due dilligance to see if it is a viable business? The same principal applies to affiliate marketing. If you don’t do your research ahead of time you could spend a bunch of time and money on something that won’t give you enough of a return. Or you could be targeting a niche that just isn’t viable for affiliate marketing.
  •  Keywords – When you go to choose a niche your keyword research will be one of your most valuable indicators to see if it is a viable niche. 
    • What keywords are people using to find a product? When you have a niche in mind do a search for the most general keyword you can think of for that niche. Most of the search engines will then put out a list of a few related searches. Make a note of those and search for those and it will bring up more and more ideas.  Most of those suggestions will bring up other suggestions or at least open up some new ideas of what keywords might work for this niche.
    • There are some tools that can make this job easier for you as well where you can enter a keyword and it will spit out a bunch of related terms you can use to build your keyword lists:

 

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.keywordspy.com

http://www.wordtracker.com 

  •  
    • Is your market big enough where there are hundreds of even thousands of keywords you can target? Or is it a smaller niche with only a few dozen keywords that will be good to use?  Both of these methods can work well depending on the market and what type of site you want to build
    • What is the general search volume on the keywords? Google’s Keyword tool along with most other keyword tools gives some estimates of search volume. I would never take these as hard and fast numbers but if you are only seeing small search volumes (less than 1,000 searches per month for example) on most of your keywords there just might not be enough search volume to make decent money.
    • That isn’t to say all your search terms need to be high volume. If you have a list of say 200 words and you have 50 or so with some good search volumes, 50 with middle of the road volumes, and 100 with low volumes that could still be a very good niche.
    • Keep in mind though that those keywords with low search volume will likely have less competition and therefore be easier to get good listings on the search engines and cheaper paid traffic. Also the more specific the keyword is the more likely the customer is to be a buyer as opposed to a shopper. Example:  Take a search for the word “air conditioner”.  Using Google’s keyword tool there were approx. 2.7 million searches in April. I would guess most people searching for that term are in the beginning stages of the buying process and just doing some research.  If you look at “window air conditioner” there are 368,000 searches but that is a customer who is probably more likely to buy.  Take it even further to a search for “whirlpool window air conditioner” and you only have 1900 searches but that will be a much more targeted customer who has probably looked at a few different models or had that brand recommended by a friend or something and will probably be much closer to buying. So you might get a bunch of traffic from a search for “air conditioners” but make fewer sales than from just a few searches for “whirlpool window air conditioner”
    • So you want to build a good sized keyword list with some high volume general keywords but also include as many specific keywords as you can.  For some sites this might be a list of 50 words and for others it can easily be thousands.           

 

  • Looking at competition – After you have your keyword lists you need to start looking at competition.  How easy will it be to get traffic to the site?  For the most part, the more competition there is the harder it will be to get traffic.  But that could also show that it could be very profitable if you do manage to get that traffic.
    • Lets look at the air conditioner searches in Google:
      • Search for “air conditioners” shows 10.3 million pages.
      • Search for “window air conditioners” shows 8.3 million
      • Search for “whirlpool air conditioners” shows 222,000
    • There will be much more competition for the first couple keywords than the more targeted one. So if you can find keywords with good volume and low competition that will probably be a good niche to look at more.
    • Also check out what the top ranking sites are. Are they big brands? National companies? Sites like Wikipedia or Amazon or Nextag or Epinions? Are they smaller sites? By looking at who you are competing against you can get a good idea if it is a market you can compete in. Seeing those big sites isn’t a deal breaker but generally speaking it is hard to compete with sites like that.

So after you have checked out the search volume and competition you should have a decent idea if this is a market to look into more.

  • Payouts - Are the payouts from the merchants high enough to justify my time and effort? Will I put forth a bunch of energy to make a few cents a sale because the payouts are low? Is there a niche where I can get easier traffic and make a few dollars per sale?
    • As a  general rule of thumb the “standard” payout on consumer goods (stuff you can normally buy in a store) is around 10%.  But that can vary widely. Consumer electronics for example have low margins to the payouts are usually less than 5%.  Other products have much higher margins for the merchants so they can pay 20% or more.
    • Would I be better off selling 10 high ticket items with big commissions or 100 cheaper items with a smaller payout per sale? You could sell a $3000 flat screen TV but the payout is only 3% which would be a $90 commission. But you could sell 20 pairs of shoes at $50 a piece for $1000 in total sales but the payout would be 12% so that is $120 in total commissions. Would it be easier to make that 1 TV sale or the 20 shoe sales?
  • Is there a demand? – Are people actually buying this product online? You would be surprised at some of the stuff people buy online when you would think there would be no way someone would buy it without seeing it in person and on the flip side there is some stuff that you think would sell well online but it just doesn’t.
  • Are there other successful affiliate sites out there? -
    • If you see a lot of different affiliates in your niche that can show you that this is a profitable niche but the competition will be greater.
    • If you see no affiliates in this niche you need to figure out why.  Is it because it isn’t very profitable or is it just because no affiliates have taken the time to make it work.

 

  • Does this interest me? – Generally speaking I recommend you start off with something you like and something that interests you. Even if the numbers don’t totally work out it will be much easier for you to build a site if you have a genuine interest in the site you are building. After you get a site or two built and get some experience building the sites, working with affiliate programs, etc. you should then start to look for the real money makers. 
  • Potential for growth -Does the niche I am working with have potential for growth?  Is this a market that is declining, growing, or staying steady? Will these products be more popular or less popular in a year?  Is there other niches I can branch off of my main niche? 
  • Effort vs Reward – Will the money I make be worth the time, effort, and resources I put into it?  Will this be a project that takes a lot of time but doesn’t have the reward?  Will it be something that might take a day or two to get going and brings in a few hundred a month?  Can I just build the site and let it go or do I need to constantly update?
  • Quick hit or long term – Many programs will be quick hitters that might only make money for a season, for a few months, or just last until the media moves on to something else. Quick hitters are fine but I would just consider them “bonus” money. Find a niche that you can make money on for a number of years.

Here is what Seth said he learned this week:

“This week I learned about how to choose what you want to advertise, or as Joe called it, a niche. I am learning how to research niches. You want something that has not very many websites that come up when you search it but also has a decent number of searches and something people are looking for. You also want to look to see if a lot of good affiliate sites come up or not. This could mean that either there is no money to be made in the niche or it hasn’t caught on for a lot of affiliates yet. You also want something that possibly can be split up into multiple sites in the future if you see some success. You also want a niche that has good payout and a lot of good keywords to use.  Some of the main factors to consider when choosing a niche is if the niche is something I would enjoy working with, if it is something that is growing or dying, is there enough reward for the effort, and whether it will be something that is seasonal and/or will only last as a major item for a little while.”

So that is it for week two.  I got some ideas for week 3 for when Seth comes to the office in a couple days.  But what do you think would be a good next step?  You have any questions about affiliate marketing you would like answered?  Leave a comment and let me know.

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Affiliate Marketing 101 – Week 1

by Joe Sousa on June 8, 2009

in Affiliate Stuff

As some of you know I now have an intern.  You can meet him here:  http://whatdoesjoethink.com/2009/05/my-new-intern/

Basically my goal is to train Seth over the summer and teach him affiliate marketing. How do I condense 10 years of my own learning into 3 or 4 months?  I have no idea but I will do my best.  For the first couple weeks I have been going over some of the basics of affiliate marketing with him and giving him some background on what affiliate marketing is and how to get started.  I will be posting a bunch of the stuff I am teaching him here with the hope that it will help some of you out.  So here is what I taught him his first week. I am sure I am missng some stuff here but here is my basic layout of “What is Affiliate Marketing”:

What is affiliate marketing?

-         Affiliate marketing is a performance based marketing system where an affiliate directs traffic to a merchant in return for a commission for any resulting sales, generated leads, etc.. 

-         There are 2 primary ways commissions are paid out:

o       A percentage of the sale. If you sell a $20 book and the commission rate is 10% you get

o       CPA – You get a flat fee based on a customer action.  This generally isn’t used with consumer products (but there are some markets such as As Seen On TV products) where this method works well. Usually CPA is used for lead generation, or a site that markets a single product. But there are CPA offers showing up for more and more traditional merchants as well

 

-         The traffic is tracked by the use of a tracking link.  Every affiliate network (more on this in a bit) or affiliate program has a different format they use for a tracking link but generally speaking the link contains the affiliate’s unique ID number, an ID number for the merchant, a place to put a subid or something of that nature for the affiliate to track which links are making the sales, and other pertinent information.

 

-         When a consumer visits the merchant’s site through one of these tracking links a cookie is set on their computer. On the “thank you” page a customer sees after a purchase is made or the customer fills out a form or whatever that sale is tracked back to the affiliate.

 

-         So basically an affiliate drives traffic to a merchant and gets paid based on the consumer’s transaction with the merchant.

 

Affiliate Networks and Programs

-         Affiliate networks are companies that work as a “middleman” between the merchants and the affiliates. The affiliate networks aggregate multiple merchants, handle all the tracking, payouts, provide stats to the merchants, give the merchants an interface to work with the affiliates, and get the merchant’s program in front of many different affiliates. For an affiliate they provide an interface to track generated sales, provide access to many different merchants, make it easy for an affiliate to get their tracking links, banners, and other ads, and help the affiliate find merchants to work with. There are some great advantages for merchants and affiliates to work with a trusted affiliate network. Here are just a few:

o       For the merchant

§         Easy way to track the affiliate activity

§         Fraud safeguards in place in many of the networks

§         Make one payment a month to the network rather than hundreds or thousands of checks to the individual affiliates

§         Access to thousands of affiliates

§         They take care of a lot of the technical side of the affiliate marketing process

o       For the affiliate

§         Many merchants in one place.

§         One big check a month as opposed to many smaller checks from the individual merchants

§         Easy to get tracking link, banners, ads, etc.

§         Easy interface to see which merchants are doing well, where the sales are coming from, etc

§         Quality affiliate managers who are there to help you

§         The networks have different sorts of fraud protection to assure that the traffic you send is tracked properly back to you

 

-         Some of the top networks I work with

o       Shareasale – http://www.shareasale.com – My favorite network to work with by far. They have a good selection of merchants to work with, an easy interface to use, and the people who work there are great to work with. They mostly have smaller merchants but there are a few big ones on there as well. Shareasale also has the tightest policy in regards to parasites and other shady practices of all the major networks

o       Linkshare – http://linkshare.com – Lots of bigger, “brand name” merchants but their interface isn’t that good

o       CJ – http://cj.com – Lots of merchants to choose from.  A good mix of big merchants and smaller ones as well.

o       GAN – http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/ Google Affiliate Network – Haven’t done much with them but they do have a pretty strong selection of merchants

-         CPA Networks – There are dozens of these out there but here are a few I work with currently and have worked with in the past.  There are positives and negatives to most of these.  Just a matter of trying them and seeing which one works best for you.

o       http://www.azoogleads.com

o       http://www.karaktrtrack.com

o       http://www.hydranetwork.com

o       http://www.advailant.com

o       http://www.neverblue.com

o       http://www.motiveinteractive.com

o       http://www.marketleverage.com

      

-         In-house affiliate programs – Many merchants choose to run their affiliate programs in-house rather than using an affiliate network. The benefit of this is they save the money they would be paying the network but it also creates more work for them. If they have a dedicated affiliate manager running their program this usually isn’t a problem but if they don’t they are missing out on a lot. In-house programs are sometimes more flexible than the programs on the networks and in many ways can be more creative and can give higher payouts.  Many merchants also have in-house programs in addition to using the networks.

 

Which is best?

 

I can’t really say. I know people who are very successful using all these different networks and many different types of programs.  There are some networks I really hate but people make millions off of them so what I suggest is try a bunch of them. Find out which one has the merchants you want to work with, which interface you like the most, read around different forums and blogs to see what people suggest, and make your pick.

 

If you put a gun to my head I would tell you to stop pointing a gun at me and then suggest http://www.shareasale.com as a good place to start. They are easy to work with, have a great selection of smaller merchants, and have a bunch of merchants who will be very helpful to you and point you in the right direction to get started.

 

So there it is.  Week 1 of Seth’s road to success. I had Seth write up a quick paragraph on what he learned from this week and what stuck out to him:

 

“During the first week I learned about what the idea of this whole affiliate marketing thing is. I learned how affiliates make money and how the interact with the merchants. The way affiliates make money is basically advertising for merchants. When someone goes to an affiliate’s website, the site will try to convince him that he need some product and when he clicks on the link to buy it from the merchant a cookie is downloaded that makes sure when he makes a purchase the affiliate gets his money. How an affiliate gets signed up with a merchant is usually through Affiliate Networks like Shareasale.com or CJ.com. There is one problem, parasites, but that’s why Joe and I think we will end up liking http://www.shareasale.com most.”

 

I will be putting up Week 2 soon which will be covering how to pick a niche, how to do some research, and how to figure out what would be the best products to target.

 

BTW, right after I decided to do all this work coming up with stuff to teach Seth I saw that Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker was releasing his own 12 week internet marketing course.  I have read the first 3 weeks of it and it is very, very good. The first couple weeks are eerily similar to what I have been teaching Seth which shows me I must be doing something right (and also shows me Jeremy is doing something right as well).  I would highly recommend going to http://shoemoneyx.com/ and signing up. It is very good information for someone just starting out but also for people who have been doing this for a while.

 

Did I miss something? Do you have something to add? Have a question about any of this? Leave a comment below and let me know.

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