Table of Contents
Chapter 1:
Introduction To Online Marketing
Chapter 2:
Monetizing Your Website
Advertising
Email Marketing
Paid Sponsorship
Offer Products: eBooks & Courses
Affiliate Marketing
Chapter 3:
Make Affiliate Marketing Your Number One Source Of Income
What Exactly Is Affiliate Marketing?
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Why Use Affiliate Marketing?
Chapter 4:
Secrets To Becoming A Successful Affiliate Marketer
Have A Killer, Content Rich Site
Finding The Right Advertising Partners
Only Promote Products That Make Sense
Set Up Your Affiliate Profile Accurately
Use Multiple Affiliate Networks
Use Analytics And Tracking
Connect To Your Readers Before You Sell
Deep linking And Higher Google Rankings
Write With SEO In Mind
Chapter 5:
Affiliate Marketing Network Company Profiles
JV Zoo
ClickBank
Commission Junction (CJ Affiliate)
LinkShare
Amazon Affiliates Program
ShareASale
Chapter 6:
Importance Of Emailing Lists
List Building
Brand Promotion
Conversion
Chapter 1: Introduction To Online Marketing
Online marketing is also known as online advertising, Internet marketing, digital advertising. However you chose to call it, online marketing is any form of online promotional techniques that are used to deliver a message to consumers in order to drive sales via electronic commerce (or e-commerce).
Thanks to the new digital age, online marketing is able to reach more customers at a faster rate. Companies are able to build up their reputation and status online through various forms of online marketing.
Typically online marketing will see an advertiser put an ad on another company’s website in order to drive traffic back to their site and see these clicks convertedto measurable sale leads. The click to conversion rate is where the money is made in online marketing. However, now there are many more techniques in online marketing that advertisers, or anyone with a website really, can use to make a profit.
As more and more people around the world are using the Internet on a regular basis, the potential to reach a larger audience with online marketing is huge. Advertisers are now able to target their advertising to the audience they want, allowing them to have greater sales than they ever could with traditional advertising mediums, like newspaper, radio, television and magazines.
To succeed in this digital world, you need to be familiar with and master online marketing techniques in order to capitalize on this new direction of digital advertising. As an increasing number of people have a screen in front of their face, the potential for interactive, targeted online advertising is huge.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that collectively in the first quarter of 2015, online advertisers in the United States ad revenue reached over $13 billion, a 16 percent increase compare to the first quarter of 2014. These numbers are unprecedented in the advertising industry and the trend is showing and even greater increase in online ad revenue.
Online marketing tools include digital advertisements, paid search (pay per click), email mailing lists, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing. While digital advertising was the number one way to monetize online advertising, it is now being shown that email marketing and affiliate marketing are the best online marketing channels to get a high return on investment (ROI) as people engage more through these channels.
Chapter 2: Monetizing Your Website
No matter what type of website you have, be it a personal blog, a news site or a company website, it can be monetized through various channels. Not all monetization channels are ideal for each type of website, so you have to see what works best for each individual website.
A great way to test what works and what does not work for your website is to do A/B testing with a site like Optimizely or heat mapping with Crazy Egg. A/B testing means putting content and ads on your website with various layouts to see which layout will best optimize your monetization strategies through customer engagement rates. You can select how often each different version of your site will be shown each time the page is re-loaded, then you will get a report back indicating which version has the highest engagement rate.
With heat mapping, you will see a screenshot of your site with an overlay of red to blue spots for where people are clicking, or engaging, the most or least. Sometimes this information will be surprising and counter-intuitive to where you thought people were engaging.
Using the highest engagement rate to place monetization channels on your website is very important. Whether it is ad placements, an email mailing list sign up form or affiliate marketing links, you can get the best optimization with proper placement.
Advertising
The first thing most people think of when they go to monetize their website is to get digital display advertisements on their site as soon as possible. Digital display ads work through advertisements being uploaded to your site through using slot tokens and keywords to get contextual ads displaying on your site. They are usually contextual because they will be targeted at the user based on their demographics and search history, or the ads will show something related to the site the user is looking at.
Digital ads work through pay-per-clicks (PPC) and click through rates (CTR). Advertisers pay for each click on the ad that is placed on your website and the higher the CTR (the number of clicks based on the number of views), then the better the ad is doing and the more money you will make from the ad.
If you website is fairly new, under six months, then you should refrain from using Google AdSense to monetize your website because they will penalize you and possibly block you out from using AdSense. There are many terms and conditions to using AdSense and it can be difficult to use and get the clicks you are hoping for.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is quickly becoming one of the leading ways to monetize your website. Targeted email lists means you can send exactly what you want to the audience who wants to see it. You know they want to see it because they have opted to sign up to receive specific newsletter via email from your website. These email lists are very important for growing your traffic and monetizing your website.
Growing your email subscribers shows a marketing or advertising company that your website has reach and can be used to promote products to the subscribers that they will enjoy. Readers who have signed up to be a part of your email marketing typically trust the sender and their opinions enough to opt into the newsletter.
This means that you can easily promote different products and services to them through paid sponsorship or affiliate marketing and they will feel more comfortable having you tell them about that product or service rather than them seeing a pesky ad trying to get them to click.
There are several email marketing service providers that will help you build campaigns, manage your email lists and track how your campaigns are doing by showing who has opened them, what they have clicked on and how much they have engaged with the email. This kind of information is very important to know how your website is doing and how the audience is interacting with your products. You can then use this information to improve your monetization channels.
Paid Sponsorship
Another way to monetize your website is through paid sponsorship, which means a company will pay you to sponsor their product or service on your website. A sponsor will pay for you to write an article featuring or reviewing their product or service, have a section on your website dedicated to their product or service, or they will simply pay for an ad space. In all cases, they are paying you to put their company’s message, product or services on your blog in hopes of getting conversions.
Sometimes paid sponsorship does not come in the form of money, but rather they will give you the product or service for free. For example, they may give you a free couple of nights in their hotel so you write a review on your website. Paid sponsors will often look at how much traffic you get to your site, your social media follows and your email subscribers to determine how much they will pay you.
Offer Products: eBooks & Courses
Most websites and blogs have a niche that they cater to. Without a niche your website probably won’t make it. Having a niche means you are an expert on the subject and people will keep coming back to learn more from you. Offering courses and eBooks help build authority and trust with your readers and help you with your branding.
Creating premium content for your readers through courses and eBooks shows you have in depth knowledge of a subject and they can be a great source of income. People will be highly likely to buy an eBook on a specified subject or take a course on a new topic. People like to learn and scour the Internet in their spare time for new things to read. You can generate a lot of income through selling your eBook on your own site, as well as have other sites have a link to sell your eBook as well.
Affiliate Marketing
Different to paid sponsorship, affiliate marketing pays for clicks that are converted to purchases on their products. Affiliate marketing can be the first form of monetization on your website as there is no need to wait to start using it. You can put affiliate marketing on your website from day one and wait for the money to start coming in, though it is recommended to build up some content to be able to implement affiliate marketing.
Sometimes if your blog or website gets good traffic then affiliate marketing companies will approach you and ask to be added to your website. In other cases, you can simply sign up with different networks, such as JVZoo, ClickBank, Amazon and CJ Affiliate.
These networks have thousands of merchants with a large pool of products to pull from. You will search for a product you would like to place on your website, get a link with your unique ID and then place that link onto your website. This link will link back to the merchant’s website so the customer can purchase the product. The unique ID and the browser’s cookies will tell the merchant that the sale came from you and you will get the commission through the affiliate marketing network where you got the link.
Chapter 3: Make Affiliate Marketing Your Number One Source Of Income
Most bloggers make the majority of their money from affiliate marketing and the commissions from it. Affiliate marketing works for bloggers because their readers come to their blogs looking for trusted reviews and information about different products and services available. With all the different information on the Internet, it can be hard to pick the product or service you want to spend your hard earned money on.
Bloggers and affiliate marketing is the perfect match because they marry products that bloggers love and want to share with their readers with selling products and making money. In many cases, bloggers do not even need to do anything more than putting in a link into the text of their articles. This link will track when someone clicks on the link and whether or not he or she ends up buying the product.
The users do not even need to buy the product right away, the blogger will get the commission if the user goes back and buys the product later because affiliate marketing uses cookies that will store when and where the product was first clicked on.
What Exactly Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is about building relationships between the advertisers, publishers and consumers to generate sales. The advertiser typically has a product or service to sell but needs help in selling it. The advertiser will look for help from a publisher to distribute their message and connect with consumers and they are willing to pay the publisher to do this.
A publisher will be someone who delivers the advertisers message in the form of a link, banner ad or in an email newsletter to the consumer. The consumer sees the message and will take action by clicking on the link, ad or newsletter, taking them away from the publisher’s site to the advertiser’s site. The final step is the when the action is completed by the consumer purchasing the product, called a conversion.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
The advertiser will give a publisher a unique ID for each of their websites in order to track and process every click. Tracking the clicks for each product is how the publisher gets commission from affiliate marketing. Not only does the publisher get a unique ID, but so does each product or link the publisher uses. The combination of unique IDs for the publisher’s website and the product allow the action of the consumers to be tracked.
If a consumer clicks on an affiliate marketing link, cookies will enable the affiliate marketer to remember the date, time and location (website) of the click on the link. Enabling cookies allows the site to know if the consumer returns at a later date to purchase the product and thus completing the conversion. This is when the publisher will receive commission from the sale.
The affiliate network is a company that oversees the relationships between the advertisers and publishers, creating a network of other companies that use their platform.
Why Use Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing can be the easiest way to monetize your website. All you need to do is sign up to be a part of an affiliate marketing website, create your account and unique ID, search for products to link throughout your website, paste the links to your site and then wait as the money comes in. The links can be in the form of text or images, or both, depending on what you need for your site. While this is the easiest approach, there are some secrets that will be discussed in the next chapter to make you a successful affiliate marketer.
Affiliate marketing is the best way for advertisers to engage with consumers and you the publisher are their key ingredient. As a publisher, your readers trust your judgment, so when you make a recommendation to them, they often listen and convert. You are very important to advertisers and you can use this to your advantage when you need to monetize your website. And just to be clear, you are the affiliate marketer. The advertisers and publishers are working together so that they can both make money, without each other there is no money to be made.
Using your email mailing list is the perfect way to distribute affiliate marketing messages to your readers. Often they will not even notice or care that you have linked them to a site in order for them to purchase the product, in fact, often your reader will be pleased to have the link. Unlike ads that often go unnoticed or have consumers feel like they are being targeted, affiliate marketing links are helpful to the consumer.
Affiliate marketing is great for putting multiple links into one article or page. Each of the affiliate marketing networks will have a plethora of products to search through that will be the perfect target for your website’s niche. While adding multiple links to maximize your earning potentials, sometimes it’s about quality over quantity. Don’t put in too many products without thinking about if the links will be beneficial to your readers or not, they might find it annoying having too many links in your articles and get turned off by your site.
Using affiliate marketing on your site is simple, easy to use and has a transparent model for monetizing your site. You simply recommend products throughout your site and that’s it. It’s really great because you don’t have to worry about creating a product and making sure it is delivered to the customer; all you do is promote it on your site and let the advertisers take care of the rest.
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Chapter 4: Secrets To Becoming A Successful Affiliate Marketer
Implementing affiliate marketing on your website can be very beneficial in your monetization strategy, if it is done correctly. You cannot just expect to sign up with an affiliate network and just expect the money to come rolling in. While this might happen in the rare, lucky, case, it will likely not happen for you. If you follow these secrets to become a successful affiliate marketer, only then you can watch the money come rolling in.
Have A Killer, Content Rich Site
To be successful as an affiliate marketer, you need to be credible. To gain credibility you have to have a great website with even better content that brings people back time and time again.
Anyone can set up a blog and start writing about whatever they like, the Internet is full of personal blogs that do not go anywhere. They key to getting a great blog or website start is to have a great design layout that makes sense and is user friendly. Your site needs to grab the reader’s attention right away with striking images and rich content.
If you don’t know how to start out designing a website, simply sign up with a web host, create your domain and set up an account on Wordpress. Once your account has been made and you’ve linked your Wordpress account to the web host, you can start looking through all the different website themes Wordpress offers. There are thousands of different free themes to choose from or if you can’t find something you like, you can search and purchase a theme through sites such as Theme Forest or elsewhere and upload it to Wordpress through your web host. Give your website’s theme some good thought, this is what can make or break your site. If visitors land on your homepage and immediately leave due to an unpleasant theme, you’ll have a high bounce rate and you will never generate any traffic. Without traffic you cannot become a successful affiliate marketer, you’ll be a want-to-be affiliate marketer.
It’s not just about the awesome design of your website either. Now that you’ve grabbed the reader’s attention with your amazing layout, you need to prove to them that they should continue coming back to your website because of it’s content. Only when you have great content will users start to trust your site and as the trust builds, they will be more inclined to listen to your product recommendations and therefore more likely to click and convert into a sale. Even though Google uses a lot of SEO for rankings, content is king.
Getting traffic to your site can be slow and difficult at first. A key tip is to make sure Google is not blocking your site from showing up in the search engine results page (SERP). Some web hosting providers, such as Arvixe, include SEO tools to get into Google that should be used and updated weekly, such as submitting your sitemap and ensuring Google is not blocking you.
Also important to be ranked in Google or to use Google AdSense, you must have a Privacy Policy Page and a Terms Of Service Page. If Google decides to block you or not rank you then it will be difficult to build traffic to your site organically and you will have to work harder on social media outlets.
It’s also important to have good content so you can put in the affiliate marketing links without seeming like you are forcing them in there. The links should seem like genuine casual recommendations, like how you would tell a friend about a great new product. If you don’t have great content, then users will not trust your site and will not click on the links and you will not get the commission.
Once you’ve spent about 3 – 4 months building up traffic and followers on your site, you can start looking at different monetizing strategies. Typically, after 3 or 4 months you’ll have built up enough great content to be able to place multiple affiliate links. You can put the affiliate links in right away, but some advertisers might see you have low traffic and they might not want to partner with you right away.
Finding The Right Advertising Partners
Before you jump right into an advertisers program, it’s important to outline who you are looking to partner with and how you foresee promoting them on your website. You should not just blindly sign up for affiliate marketing programs in hopes of making money instantly. You need to have a plan to know which direction you want to take it and how it will benefit your site and how it will benefit the advertisers.
Questions to ask yourself before signing up: What is my niche? What types of products can I promote on my site, apparel, electronics, travel, etc.? Or are there multiple categories? It is very important to know what you are looking for.
Once you’ve signed up for to an affiliate marketing network like JV Zoo, ClickBank or CJ Affiliate, you can filter the advertisers by the categories, keywords, content and the area that an advertiser will ship to. Each advertiser will have slightly different programs terms and commission rates that you have to comply with.
You’ll find some advertising partners are going to work much better with your site and you’ll enjoy working with them more. Find the relationships that work for you and that you can see will turn into a long lasting relationship. The more reliable the advertiser is, the more likely you will be successful with them for the long haul.
Only Promote Products That Make Sense
If you already have a following on your website with good traffic, chances are you have enough returning users who trust what you have to say and promote. Try to stick to products that have a natural flow in your website. If you put in a product that seems out
of place and completely like it is something your are force promoting, your loyal readers will start to question your judgment and be turned off by the misplaced product rather quickly.
Promoting products that do not fit with your site will likely not get any clicks and this will lower your overall conversion rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitor’s to your website who are converted to a sale, or lead, by not only clicking on the product you have linked but also purchasing it. Misplaced products will not have any conversions.
Don’t just sell, sell, sell. You should figure out the number of products that feels natural for an article or your whole site in general. If you are doing an article called the “best X number of Y products”, with Y being the type of product, then only put in X number of the products in the article. Don’t place additional products that do not belong in the article that will confuse the reader in hopes of getting more clicks.
Be helpful to your audience and promote quality products that add value to your readers. Why do people come to your site? They want to see and hear what you have to say. They enjoy your site and will come back to it. They had a need or a question that needed to be answered, so they came to your site to seek help. They are interested in the different products you have to recommend. You only want to put in products that make sense on your site and the readers will find valuable. Do not try to trick your readers.
If you write about a topic you are passionate about, it will shine through to your readers. Try to keep to products that you have personally tried out and found useful. However, do not feel obligated to purchase a product just so you can do a product review. Be smart about what you are promoting on your site.
You also only want to promote products that you know are good. The worst thing that can happen is that you promote a product you do not believe in or have not thoroughly researched and you have a customer come back to you after buying it based on your recommendation and tell you it was a horrible mistake and they want their money back. This can ruin your credibility as an affiliate marketer.
Set Up Your Affiliate Profile Accurately
An important step in the whole affiliate marketing process is to ensure that your profile on the affiliate marketing network is accurate. This might seem like a no-brainer, but if you profile has any incorrect information, then you will not receive payment from the site.
Some networks, such as Amazon and CJ Affiliate, require you to put in your tax information before you can gain any earning from the site.
Use Multiple Affiliate Networks
Signing up with several affiliate marketing networks will help maximize the revenue potential for your site. It’s always smart to diversify.Every niche is different and will require different strategies. By using multiple networks you can constantly test and improve on which affiliate network is the best for your site.
Signing up with multiple affiliate networks will allow you to get to know how each one works and which one you like the best. Each has different features and advantages and disadvantages; so test them out and find your favorite.It can take 1 – 2 months to really find the affiliate network that is best suited for your site.Not every network will work for your niche and you’ll find out which one works as you go along.
Use Analytics And Tracking
Don’t just expect to put affiliate marketing links into your site and expect to make money. You should always keep track of what you are doing and how the links are performing. Each affiliate network should have a reporting or tracking section to tell you how each of your links are performing.
You should be monitoring these reports often to see if there are any trends emerging. For example, perhaps you’ll notice that all of the links you put in the top of your articles always perform better than the ones at the bottom. If you notice this as a trend, then put the products that will earn the most money at the top of the article so they are more likely to have a higher conversion rate.
If you see that some links are not performing at all consistently, then take them out as it will lower your conversion rating and advertisers will take notice.If you are noticing that many links are not performing well, then try to switch it around and trying new links. It will take some time to learn what is working and what doesn’t, but when you get there, you’ll start to have a couple articles that consistently perform well and become your moneymakers.
Not only should you be looking at the analytics that the affiliate networking companies provide on tracking your links, but you should also set up Google Analytics for your entire website. This will give you demographics and analytics on your audience so you can pick better products that are better suited to your specific audience. If you find your audience is primarily in Europe and you are only promoting products that ship to the United States and not Europe, then your conversion rate will be low.
Connect To Your Readers Before You Sell
Collect emails, build relationships on social media, engage with your readers so they feel like you’re helping them and there is a true relationship, so when they are ready to buy something, they will come to you.
You want to engage with your readers by replying to the comments and questions in a promptly manner. This can be a little time consuming but it adds great value to the relationship between you and the reader. It makes them feel more connected to you, gives them proof that you care able them and value their opinion. Everything that builds up trust will have your readers being loyal to you and coming back to purchase your products when they feel ready.
Social media.Social media.Social media. If you aren’t already on it, get on it. As painful and delightful as all the different social media platforms can be, they’re your new best friends for growing your followers. Plus, they are a great way to connect with your readers. Everyone has their own preference for social media platforms, but if your website doesn’t have at least Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, you’re hurting your websites potential. Obviously some different niches won’t use all of the platforms regularly, so find out which ones work best for you and use them often.
Connect with your readers by finding out what other sites and social media platforms they use. Find out where your audience hangs out so that you can follow them there and promote your website and the products you are featuring.
Pinterest can be a surprisingly helpful tool to drive traffic to your site, sometimes more so than Facebook and Twitter. It can be especially helpful when you are using affiliate marketing. You can create a vertical pin (735 px by 1102 px) featuring one of the products you are featuring. Your pin can have the image of the product or something creative about the post, with the pin linking to your site’s page that has the product on it. Or you can link directly to the affiliate link and it can take them directly to the advertiser.
You can use social media management websites like Hootsuite, where you can plan out what to post, when to post and on which social media platform to post it on. You can also see who is engaging with you on social media, who’s talking about you and all kinds of analytics that will be very helpful to learn about your audience. The more you know your audience, the more you can successfully use affiliate marketing. This will help you organize everything so you don’t go crazy with all the social media.
Don’t forget about your early and loyal followers who helped build the foundation of your traffic. It’s likely some of the people who first signed up for your mailing list or to follow you will be some of your best customers later on down the road. Be sure to keep building a relationship with the early followers as you grow your traffic.
Deep linking And Higher Google Rankings
Deep linking is another SEO term that refers to linking to an inner page of a website rather than homepage.
Advertisements are recognized as Google as advertisements. When affiliate links are deep links, Google sees them as part of the content of the page. Deep linking allows the links to be bypassed as advertising and appear to be part of the content that is linking to another page. They are called deep links because they take you deeper into a website than just linking to the home page. The benefit of deep linking is that Google will index these links as part of your page, giving you better link juice. It is also possible that Google will pull up your page when someone searches for the product. Articles with affiliate marketing links in them tend to have deep links in them and therefore Google will award these links and rank them higher.
Deep linking can reduce your bounce rate and increase your page views and subscribers. Deep links are better for readers because it means they get to the page they want quickly. Deep linking can increase your page’s entire authority, something you want. Deep linking help pages that might be hidden and not be indexed by Google get indexed. Since most affiliate marketing links are deep linking, adding affiliate marketing to your website is highly beneficial, not only to monetize, but to increase your visibility and traffic.
Write With SEO In Mind
Placing the affiliate links into an article is great. But if Google doesn’t find your articles and your traffic is not growing organically, then people will not see it. Once you write an article, it’s up and out there on the web. You don’t have to do anything else to it. So if you write with SEO optimization in mind then you don’t have to go back and tweak the article later for Google to find it.When you write good high quality content, in time, Google will take notice.
Do SEO keywords research to determine the content of your articles. The same keywords can be used when you are searching for advertisers and products through the affiliate network. This will also match products better, giving your site more credibility.
Chapter 5: Affiliate Marketing Network Company Profiles
There are several different affiliate marketing networks online today, all with thousands of advertisers to choose from offering millions of products. Some networks are larger, older, more established or more suited for your needs. Here are some of the top affiliate marketing networks out there are the moment. Read these companies profiles to see if any catch your eye as one you would like to sign up with.
JV Zoo
JV Zoo is newer to the affiliate marketing scene than other networks, however they are quickly becoming the rising star because it is easy to use and free to sign up. They have a large number of advertisers offing a wide range of products. There are some products that are only available on JV Zoo, so even if you are already using other affiliate networks, JV Zoo can still be profitable to you. JV Zoo has great customer service and is always happy to help out. While they do not have the best looking user interface, it is practical and easy to use.
One of the great features that JV Zoo has that the other networks do not have is that your commissions go instantly into your PayPal account. JV Zoo is very popular among the “make money online” crowd because it is easy to get paid instantly with the adaptive PayPal payment scheme. Why wait for your hard earned money. This is one of the reasons that JV Zoo is quickly becoming one of the more popular affiliate networks even though it is one of the newer ones.
Refunds with affiliate marketing can become a nightmare and ruin your reputation based on the payment schemes of the other affiliate networks. With JV Zoo there is no issue with the buyer getting their money back because with instant and direct PayPal payments, PayPal simply deducts the payments from both the publisher and the advertisers accounts the same way the payment when in.
JV Zoo also has great integration with Warrior Forum (a larger marketplace for online marketing products). When the Warrior Forum goes down, which it is known to do, it reroutes all the affiliate marketing links to the JV Zoo network.
ClickBank
Perhaps one of the oldest affiliate marketing networks out there, ClickBank is also one of the best affiliate marketing networks. You can earn commissions of 1% to 80% from their large network of advertisers. In fact, ClickBank has the largest source of advertisers of all the affiliate networks.
ClickBank’s 60-day money back guarantee is very important to consumers and they feel comfortable when they see the ClickBank logo. The reputation of ClickBank precedes itself and when a consumer sees the logo they know they are getting a quality product.
Click Bank Only offers digital information products. ClickBank might not be the right network if you are focused on fashion or sports, for example. Since there are no distribution costs with the products ClickBank offers, this allows a higher percentage of commission to go to the affiliate.
Commission Junction (CJ Affiliate)
Commission Junction (CJ Affiliate) is now one of the largest affiliate networks on the web. Almost every major merchant is on CJ Affiliate, giving the affiliates a greater range of products to chose from. Affiliates get even more power in the decision-making because the advertisers offer multiple creative sizes. This customization and plethora of products makes it nearly impossible to not find a product to promote on your site, no matter what your niche is.
CJ Affiliate has one of the most powerful reporting systems in all the affiliate networks. This will greatly help you optimize your performance. The more you analyze how your products are doing and tweaking them to do better, the more money you will make. With CJ, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. That being said, it can be a steep learning curve to set up, navigate and understand all the reports.
To complete the application process for CJ Affiliate you need to enter your tax information. Without it you are barred from using the network.
LinkShare
LinkShare is also one of the oldest affiliate networking sites on the web, however, it still remains to be a smaller one, only have a small percentage of merchants compared to some of the other networks. However, this does not stop them from being one of the top affiliate networks.
One of the main features of LinkShare is that you can rotate through multiple banner ads for a particular product from a single snippet of code. This is a key feature because you do not have to manually select which banner to run and it allows for variety on your site.
LinkShare also allows for flexible deep linking options. This means that you can link directly to products instead of the merchant’s home page. You don’t need to be approved to sign up and can start using LinkShare right away. LinkShare does have a considerably smaller merchant pool than other networks, such as CJ,thathave most of LinkShare’s merchant pool plus more.
Amazon Affiliates Program
The Amazon Affiliates Program quite possibly has the largest pool or products because of the large amount of merchants on Amazon. Anything that is sold on Amazon can be turned into an affiliate link to be put on your site. You’re likely familiar with Amazon and the huge amount of products on it. This is probably the easiest affiliate network to get started on and learn how things work.
The Amazon Affiliates Program is possibly one of the easiest networks to set up and get started with. The reporting abilities are a little weak, but sufficient to see how your links are performing. Like CJ Affiliate, you will need to upload your tax information before you will receive any payments from the program. The whole network is a little dry and less involved than the other networks, but you will find some products that you won’t on other networks.
The payment scheme of Amazon Affiliates is a little less than other networks, hitting only 4% - 15% for commission. You will get a large variety of products to choose from and easily set up your account but you won’t see as much money as you will from other networks. Another drawback of Amazon Affiliates is that they have a net-60 payment policy, which means you will not receive your commission from a sale until two months after the sale occurred.
ShareASale
ShareASale has a large network of merchants from small businesses to the big Fortune 500s and they have been around for 14 years, so they have built up relationships with credible merchants. The payment scheme of ShareASale is the 20th of each month via direct deposit or check.
ShareASale offers a large range of comparisons when you are trying to decide which offer to select. This is great when trying to decide on which offer will be the best to promote on your site.
In order to sign up with ShareASale, they need to approve your website which can take 2 – 4 business days. ShareASale also has a difficult to use user interface that can be cumbersome for new users. Once you get the hang of it, you can make good money on ShareASale.
Chapter 6: Importance Of Emailing Lists
A great way to take advantage of affiliate marketing links and promoting them to your readers directly is through email marketing lists. If your site does not already have a subscription form, set on up as soon as possible. Having a mailing list is best way to grow your traffic and interact with your readers on a more personal level.
Email marketing is the easiest way to connect to your followers. You can personalize and customize emails to be sent out to your subscribers at a frequency you choose; usually bimonthly or monthly so your users do not become annoyed by the frequency they receive something from you.
There are multiple different email marketing solutions, such as MailChimp and Benchmark Email, that will manage your contacts into various lists, help you design your email campaigns through preset templates and will track and provide various analytics for who opened your campaign, what they clicked on, who did not receive the email, who forwarded the email to someone else and other results that are important for optimization.
Of all the online marketing tools, email marketing is quickly becoming the most important because you can deliver your website’s message and other forms of marketing directly to your reader in the newsletter sent to their inbox.
List Building
To start your list building you need to have a subscription form on your website. Readers who enjoy your site and want to be kept up to date on new content and promotions will sign up to receive your newsletter via email. It is very important for people to subscribe to your newsletter by opting-in and agreeing to receive it. In fact, in some countries, it is the law that readers subscribe to your newsletter and have the option to unsubscribe easily each time they receive a new newsletter from you.
You can create multiple lists for your website depending on who is signing up to subscribe. You can create different lists depending on demographics, interests, promotions and information. The user must subscribe to each list to receive the newsletter. By creating multiple streams of newsletters you can really target and personalize who is receiving what to you and add value to your subscriber.
Building up your lists through subscription forms is sometimes easier than using social media. You do not have to push your readers to subscribe; you simply need a subscription form on your site. Once you put your subscription form up, you just need to wait for people to actually subscribe. You can set up auto-responders with the various email marketing solution sites that will introduce the new subscriber to your newsletters and inform them what they have subscribed to.
The great thing about emailing lists is that you can personalize each email for each receiver. The campaign will have a spot you can put in the person’s name or other information so that whatever they have put as their name in the sign up form will appear in the email. This is great for building a relationship with your reader.
Everyone checks their email on a regular basis, so you know for sure they at least see your email come into their inbox. The trick is to get them to open your email and engage with it. You can track who has opened it and who has not with the analytics in each email marketing platform.
Brand Promotion
Email marketing is a simple and quick way to remind your readers to keep coming back to your website. It’s a great tool that arrives directly to their inbox to tell them about your brand. Promoting your brand is important to gain traffic. If people don’t remember your brand, they won’t think about returning to your site to purchase anything.
Emailing lists are very important for customer acquisition and engagement. Make sure you are promoting your products in a creative way that stays true to your brand. Email marketing is an important tool to really develop your brand and see what works with your customers. With all the different tracking and reporting abilities of email marketing, you can really see how your customers are engaging with the personalized emails you send out.
Just be careful on the frequency in which you are sending out emails to your various lists. If some subscribers are on multiple lists, they might get annoyed with your brand and unsubscribe. The maximum frequency you should be sending out your emails is about once every two weeks, sometimes just once a month is good.
Conversion
Email marketing is a great way to boost your conversation rate as an affiliate marketer.
Since people spend more time reading their emails than they do on social media, it’s important that you take advantage of this marketing channel. It can really complement and improve your other marketing strategies.
You can send out emails that focus on promoting only the products you are promoting through affiliate marketing, or if you prefer a less direct approach, feature the articles that have the highest commission products in them. All of this will help improve your conversion rate. When advertisers see you have a high conversion rate they may approach you with great deals or be more willing to work with you.
Customizing emails for your reader’s demographics will also help you better target your promotions. You can segment the emails in the readers’ gender, age, location and anything else you might want to target. This customized and personalized email will make your reader feel like you are letting them in on a secret through the email.
It has been shown that email marketing is a high source for conversions, with the
highest click through rates coming in on Saturdays. Email campaigns that have words like ‘secrets’, ‘e-sales’ and ‘awesome’ in the subject line and were fewer than 30 characters have also been showing to get higher clicks. It has also been reported that people who buy products marketed through email spend more money than those who do not receive the email offers.
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