Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing’ Category
Loyalty Website Best Practices for Affiliate Marketers
By Kyle Henrie | June 26, 2008
Are you looking to build customer loyalty of your affiliate website by offering customer incentives to build long-term customer loyalty? Here are some do’s and don’t to help you turn your browsing customer into a loyal customer while increasing your affiliate sales.
DO’S
- Offer a competitive percentage back to your users.
- Use reliable tracking to properly credit your users.
- Make sure to remind users to click on your link before purchase is made to make sure it tracks properly.
- Use offers when available (such as free shipping or coupons).
- If a special offer is available, make the start and end dates known.
- Watch for specific communication from your advertisers concerning your offer and upcoming promotions.
- Offer well converting advertisers on your homepage for maximum commissions.
- Notify advertisers of missed transactions for proper commissions to be paid.
- Notify your specific users that they MUST click on your link before their purchase takes place, to avoid the above issue.
- Work on strategies; E-mail, link, compensation and site layout.
- Most loyalty publishers either do a 50/50 split or a 60/40 split. This means that depending on the commission offer from the advertiser, you will keep 50% of the commission and offer 50% back as a rebate to your member. Or, as in the case of 60/40, you’d keep 60% and offer 40% back as a rebate.
DON’TS
- Do not use incorrect or expired coupon codes or offers such as free shipping.
- Do not state incorrect start and end dates on offers and coupons.
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing Strategies | No Comments »
Monetize Your Blog
By Kyle Henrie | June 20, 2008
If you’ve read any press in the last year, the number of Internet users already reading blogs and blogging themselves may shock you. The blogging audience is definitely there, but what are they reading? Everything under the sun, from plastic surgery to biking across New Zealand. Closer to home, blogs track performance marketing strategies and the opinions of a host of online marketing professionals. The point here is that you’ve got a great deal of people reading a great deal of highly-targeted content.
So now it makes sense to ask: can you effectively monetize one of the Web’s last vestiges of traditionally marketing-free content to reach these tantalizing audiences? Should you? We think blog advertising maybe a line worth crossing assuming that we can find ways to include contextually relevant ads that provide value to blog readers. After all, hosting and ISPs don’t pay for themselves.
Lawrence Lee, president of Zoundry.com, developer of a blog monetizing tool, shares his perspective below:
“We’re seeing two types of bloggers.
- The first are bloggers who are writing for their friends and family. Given that they already have a trusted relationship, credibility around product recommendations is a non-issue. In a sense, friends and family can reward publishers for learning about new, often niche, products they wouldn’t have learned about otherwise.
- The second [group] are people who don’t necessarily call themselves bloggers, or view themselves as journalists. They are just using the simple tools of blogging to publisher Web sites without having to learn HTML, so they don’t have credibility issues around monetizing their blogs either.”
So let’s assume you fall into the categories above or that you’re on board with blogging. Now it’s Advertising 101: know your audience and target your ads accordingly. Beth Kirsch, senior marketing manager at Audible.com and affiliate marketing veteran, says “You have to be extremely strategic - matching the context of the blog to the product is the key. It’s tricky, but can be a wonderfully effective channel when done well.”
In other words, one can’t simply throw up an apparel advertiser’s banner in the middle of a blog about the experiences of tuning up your car’s engine and expect to generate commissions. However, placing a “Pickup this year’s hottest toy” ad when blogging about buying birthday gifts is both contextually relevant and valuable to readers.
If you’re already blogging, chances are there are plenty of you who match your content and audience. Take the lead of your competitors and implement your unique, lucrative take on blogs today!
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing Strategies | No Comments »
SEO Tips for Affiliate Marketers
By Kyle Henrie | June 10, 2008
Below are some SEO tips that we hope many of you will find useful. Time and time again I find these issues from people operating affiliate-based websites. Take the time to fix these things and you should see results.
- Fix any broken links. Broken links cause the site’s relevancy to decrease.
- It is vital to contain a site map on a large site. Links from every page need to link back to the site map in order for search engine spiders to locate the pages.
- Write unique content on your website as often as possible. The more relevant the content, the more a search engine will consider the site valid.
- Ensure that an H1 tag is not below an H2 or H3 tag on your page(s). H1 tags are the most important tags- if they are lower on the page, a search engine will consider not as relevant.
- A helpful tool to fix meta and title tags: http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html These show up as the description in a search engine. For usability purposes, if they do not pertain to a user’s needs, they will not click.
- ALWAYS, always, always track your work using an analytics program to ensure traffic control and conversion rates.
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing Strategies | No Comments »
