Affiliate Network Marketing 101

Affiliate Network Marketing 101 - A Crash Course
-by Affiliate Official http://affiliateofficial.com/

C0ntents provided by Internet Marketing Guidebook http://imguidebook.com

Let the professionals help you… in mass. Affiliate Networks provide an environment where companies who have something to sell (Advertisers) meet with companies who know how to sell it (Publishers). Many large Affiliate Networks provide hundreds of products to be sold to their network of thousands of publishers.

Affiliate Networks generally work on a performance basis (CPA), where you only pay when a sale or lead is generated for you. You receive a sale or lead at a predetermined cost and then award the Affiliate Network with a bounty for generating the sale or lead for you. The Affiliate Network then pays their publishers for generating sales on your behalf, minus what the network keeps for itself for putting the deal together. This may sound similar to a shopping portal, however there are some distinct differences. A shopping portal places your products in direct connection with the online shopper. Affiliate Networks place your products in direct connection with publishers (marketing or media companies.) Each publisher will then use their own resources to generate sales for you, be it PPC, SEO, Email, banners and the like.

Affiliate campaigns do not work for every product or service, and many Affiliate Networks will not accept your offer unless certain criteria are met. Affiliate campaigns need to be designed to allow for easy sales or lead conversions. Most sales lead generation campaigns work across Affiliate Networks as long as you are not trying to collect too much information, or information that makes your customers feel nervous such as a social security number. For product sales, you need to present a very attractive offer like a free 7 day trial for a diet pill, free services for 1 month, or anything that can be considered a low risk bargain. An offer such as a 42” plasma screen Television for only $1,597 will not work. As always, there are exceptions, and you may need to work closely with your affiliate manager to produce a campaign that will be popular amongst the publishers.

Due to the nature of Affiliate Networks they can be volatile and risky, and are not recommended for any company until they have a lot of internet marketing experience under their belt. The overall sales potential of Affiliate Network marketing can be enormous, and any time gigantic sales numbers come into play, so do gigantic risks. Many Affiliate Networks have what are known as “Super Affiliates” who have the potential to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales commissions each month. The volatility stems from both the marketing power available through an Affiliate Network, along with the performance-based environment they provide.

For the most part, the publishers who do the selling through Affiliate Networks are greedy. They want to sell only the products and services that yield them the most revenue. It is their right, after all, because they are working on a performance basis and assume all marketing risks. If a good offer comes across an Affiliate Network, where a lot of money can be made, many publishers will market the product and sales come streaming in. If a product comes in that does not generate good or at least acceptable revenue for the publishers, they will chose to not market the product and sales will be almost nonexistent. It is difficult to find the right balance to satisfy all parties involved (advertiser, publisher, Affiliate Network, and potential customer.) All parties must be happy in order to yield a successful affiliate campaign. The swing between a high performing campaign and an unpopular one can be tremendous and this volatility introduces significant risk. Risk comes from affiliate campaigns in three flavors.

Affiliate Network Marketing Risk:

(1) Not enough business
You have placed significant time and resources to build an affiliate campaign. You have commissioned all types of marketing creative, web design and even bulked up your sales staff. Despite this preparation, your offer is not a money maker for the publishers, and they are not marketing your campaign. Your expenses have increased in anticipation of increased sales that simply never materialized.

(2) Too much business
You hit the nail on the head… Your offer is hot and the publishers love it. They love it so much that leads or sales flow in faster than you can handle. Your call center can handle 50 leads per day but the publishers are generating 200. For each sale or lead made you must pay a commission whether or not you can address it. You are literally downing in too much business, and your pocketbook can’t hold out long enough to expand accordingly.

(3) Cheating
You didn’t invest much effort in validating your sales or leads. Your affiliate campaign is generating a lot of leads, but sales are not happening. You are receiving numerous disconnected phone numbers, invalid credit card numbers or people who say “I only signed up for the free gift I would get by requesting info from you.” Leads are coming in, but a bunch of crooked publishers are submitting fake information to get paid as if their data was real. Notice how that last lead had a Texas area code, their zip code was “12345,” they stated they live in Alaska and gave you the credit card number “4444555544445555.”

Many Affiliate Networks will also ask if they can run your campaign exclusively. This means that they are the only Affiliate Campaign who can provide your offer to the world. There are some distinct advantages and disadvantages to running your campaign exclusively with one network.

Exclusive Affiliate Network Campaign Advantages:

· Your Affiliate Campaign Manager will pass your campaign on to other Affiliate Networks, and manage your account for you. This saves you considerable time by not having to seek out new networks, organizing campaign launches, marketing creative, and other tasks required to launch a new campaign.

· You will not have to pay startup fees or sign contracts for the Affiliate Networks that your Affiliate Manager passes your campaign on to. You simply work under your single agreement with your Affiliate Manager. This can save you thousands of dollars in startup costs.

· Affiliate Networks use exclusive campaigns as “bragging rights,” and often give priority to their exclusive campaigns. Your campaign is more likely to be advertised to the publishers and given special attention. This helps to get your campaign noticed by the publisher, and ultimately increases sales or lead flow.

Exclusive Affiliate Network Disadvantages:

· Your campaign manager will outsource your campaign to other Affiliate Networks. You will not know exactly who is marketing your offer and therefore the quality of the web traffic coming into your website is unknown.

· Your Affiliate Manager may not be as ambitious as you. Your campaign may not get passed on to other Affiliate Networks, and because it is an exclusive offer you can’t pass it on to other networks. Growth may become stifled.

· The publishers who run your campaign through the outsourced Affiliate Networks will not receive as high of a payout (sales commission). There are effectively two Affiliate Networks, your direct Affiliate Network and the outsourced Affiliate Network, who receive a sales commission, leaving less money for the publisher. The decreased publisher bounty with result in decreased interest in your campaign, so the outsourced Affiliate Networks will not be as productive as if you worked with them directly.

Most Affiliate Networks will want to incorporate Email marketing into your campaign. This is strongly recommended, as sales or lead generation volumes will be significantly higher. If you do allow your campaign to be Email marketed, you will need to be able to maintain an Email suppression list. The suppression list is a list of Email addresses of people who want to opt-out from receiving your offer. An opt-out link must be provided on your Email marketing creative where people can opt-out from your offer. You must then supply the suppression file to your Affiliate Network so they can in turn pass your suppression file to their publishers. This is a part of the Can-Spam law and it can be effectively managed with a small opt-out landing page connected to a simple database. Make sure you provide an updated suppression file to your Affiliate Networks at least once per week.

Launching Affiliate Campaigns that Convert:

· You goal is to generate a campaign that puts the most money possible into your publisher’s pockets, while also generating a profit yourself. Keep in mind that a break-even campaign is also a successful campaign as long as you can remarket your clients and generate additional sales, upgrades, etc.

· Design your campaign to maximize conversions. Minimize the clicks needed to purchase a product, or have your lead generation form on the home page. Don’t collect information that you really don’t need or that people do not like to give out (like a SSN.) You may have to build a unique website for the affiliate campaign if your current website is not tuned for affiliate marketing.

· You are competing against all of the other campaigns on an Affiliate Network, not just ones selling the same thing you are. Publishers optimize the offers they market and drop the poor performing campaigns. Design an offer that works both for you and your publishers; your affiliate manager can help.

· Make the steps necessary to allow your campaign to be Email marketed by the publishers. This means you will need to create Can-Spam compliant Email marketing creative, an opt-out page linked to a database, and provide access to an updated suppression file (a text dump of your database suppression file.) Email marketing will significantly amplify your campaign’s effectiveness.

· Develop a large selection of various marketing creatives, lots of standard size banners, multiple Email creatives, multiple Email titles and subject lines, various text links and so on. Your affiliate manager will provide you a list of critical media types and sizes, but try to provide more than their minimum requirements.

· Review the “detecting fraud” section of the IMGB, don’t move forward if you are not protected. Stay on top of lead quality.

· Every time you make a change to your website, submit a test to ensure that the affiliate campaign is still running as it should be. If your website has an error preventing sales conversions or generating tracking issues, you may be asked to pay the publishers for their lost business. Remember that your broken website will affect many companies who stuck their neck out for you.

· Be prepared for large volumes of leads, or no leads at all.
The risks associated with affiliate marketing are many and they are significant. You must be on your toes, thinking ahead and quick to move if things turn sour. But if you come prepared and design an offer that the publishers love, the financial rewards can be enormous. Best keep affiliate marketing on the back burner until you have some experience under your belt and are prepared for real-time lead validation and high-volume sales.

- http://www.imguidebook.com/

The Unhappy Client

The Unhappy Client
-by Affiliate Official http://affiliateofficial.com

We've all had them. The clients, the projects, that no matter what you do, it just doesn't work. Maybe it's an SEO campaign that simply doesn't perform, no matter how many angles you approach it from. All the things that work for every other client seem to produce nothing at all for this one. Maybe it's a web design that the client is never happy with, despite your attempts to do everything that they ask for. Maybe it's an email campaign that fell flat on its face, or a custom software application that takes twice as long to debug as it should. Sooner or later, your one-happy client relationship turns ugly. It happens to everybody, because that's the nature of the beast.

So what do you do in these cases? To an extent, that depends on the job, on the client, and on your company's philosophy. Our company will do our best to save the client relationship in almost all cases, by offering them a few months of free SEO, a make-good email campaign, etc. Mostly, we try very hard to open the lines of communication with the client.

STRATEGIES FOR HANDLING THE UNHAPPY CLIENT:

1. TALK TO THEM QUICKLY. Nothing takes a client from "unhappy" to "furious" faster than feeling as though they are being ignored. If a client has expressed their dissatisfaction to you, then someone needs to get back to them as soon as possible and assure them that their concerns are being looked into. Even if the first call is just to tell them that you've got someone looking into the situation, and you'll call them back as soon as you have more information, that can go a long way toward calming the client down.

2. Research the concerns. When you do call the client back for the in-depth discussion, make sure you've got all your facts straight, and have them at your fingertips. Know the terms of the contract, know exactly what was promised and when, know if they are current on payment or not. Read through past correspondence, paying particular attention to any concerns they have expressed, and whether or not those were addressed properly. And always, always make sure that you are willing to accept responsibility for any problems on your end. Don't make a bad situation worse by not really knowing what's going on; the client will feel that you're lying to them, or that they've been passed off to someone whose job is just to shut them up.

3. Know what your options are. This comes directly from #2 above. If you know exactly what was promised and what's been done, you'll know what you can do from here. If you've more than fulfilled the contract, and the work is satisfactory from that perspective, then there might not be much more that you can do. If you've fulfilled the basic terms of the contract but the outcome was NOT satisfactory, then you should be ready to offer them a solution which will lead to the result that was promised. Know if you can offer them some "freebies", and if so, how many, and how long it will take to set things right.

4. Know when to get out. You've done everything you can, and the client is still not happy. You gave them free design work, but they're never happy, or they keep changing their minds. You've created a neat little software application that does precisely what they requested, but now they want more, or different. You've revisited their website(s) once a month for 6 months, trying to find a better way to optimize, they've got great rankings, but no traffic. Maybe they have great rankings AND traffic, but no sales. Whatever the case, there comes a time with some clients when you just have to admit that it isn't going to work out. Hopefully it doesn't happen very often, but it will happen sometimes. When that time comes, get out. Do it as gracefully as possible, be tactful, be apologetic that things could not work out, but get out before you lose more time and money on a project that is doomed to failure.

Sometimes the unhappy client has good cause, sometimes they don't. Both types of clients need to be treated the same way though, whenever possible. Be attentive, be concerned, be responsive, and be helpful. Don't burn any bridges, you never know what might happen in the future. Yesterday's unhappy client just might be tomorrow's referral. It's happened to me!

Web Design DON'T List: A Case Study

Web Design DON'T List: A Case Study
by Affiliate Official - http://affiliateofficial.com

I see a lot of websites during the course of any given day. Frequently, I am called upon to do a site review and analysis for someone, so I've gotten into the habit of perusing sites with a fairly critical eye in terms of design, layout, content, and overall usability. Some sites are great, some are appalling, but most fall somewhere in the middle. Site design is critical for successful internet marketing, because all the great marketing in the world won't help you if your website doesn't get the job done. If your site cannot convert visitors to sales, then your marketing dollars are wasted.

This morning, I visited an SEO website, in the line of routine research. When I visit a web design or SEO site, I expect certain things. Specifically, I expect the site to embody all of the qualities that are being promised to the customers. The site should be clean, easy to read, load properly, and have all the navigation working. If it's a marketing site, I expect to see optimization along current internet guidelines, and I expect attention to detail.

I realize that I'm probably extremely nit-picky when looking at sites that offer similar services to ours! However, even making allowances, this site did not measure up. I felt the design overlooked some key points which should be second-nature for an SEO site, and it had not been properly proofed and checked. I'm not naming names, because this isn't about trying to make someone look bad. The point is, no one is immune to site design issues! I felt that I could do a review on this site to illustrate some of the points I raised earlier, giving specific examples of problems I encountered.

This, then, is a recipe for internet sales trouble, based on an actual case study:

1. Tiny fonts that are light in color. The content was difficult to read at best, and absolutely impossible in some cases. The navigation blended so well into the background that I'm still not certain what pages the site really has! No casual visitor will care enough to work that hard, especially in a competitive market. Rule of thumb: Create your site using Internet Explorer default settings, for the most commonly used screen resolution (still 800 x 600). You are designing for the average person, not the techie. Most of them leave the default settings on their computers, and plenty of them have vision problems!

2. Feature boxes that don't link to the pages they summarize. On the right side of the page, I found the box which summarized the information I wanted. I had to go to the left side of the page and down, through the virtually-invisible navigation, to link to the page I wanted. Very frustrating. Rule of thumb: If you're discussing something on your site, link it! Make it very easy for your visitor to find what they want, and they'll love you!

3. Unclear navigation. Many of the links had similar names, and were just vague enough that it took me three tries to get to the page I had wanted the first time. If I was a casual web surfer, I would have stopped after the first one and gone somewhere else. Rule of thumb: Links should be well-labeled and very obvious, both in placement and in meaning. Help them find what they need.

4. Incomplete information. I did finally find the marketing packages. Two had pricing, the third did not. It wasn't completely clear just what was included in the packages offered. I work in this industry. If I can't understand what the offer is, there's no way an average visitor can. Rule of thumb: Make it as easy as possible for people to buy from you... prices, descriptions, and a link to purchase immediately online. Don't talk down, but never assume people have any specialized knowledge.

5. No proofing. Among other typos, "optimization" was misspelled, as was "professional". Some of the links do not work. This gives a very bad impression. If they can't be bothered to pay attention to detail on their own site, how can I trust them with mine? Rule of thumb: First impressions count for as much on the internet as they do in real life meetings. Your site represents you and your business. Make sure that it says the right things! And from a search engine standpoint, dead links are a death blow.

Although this was a case study for an SEO site, these mistakes are very common across the board. If you want your website to generate business, you have to make it user-friendly. If people cannot read what you have to offer, they cannot buy it. If they cannot find the product/service page that they need, they cannot buy that product or service. If they cannot find pricing or descriptions, they will not buy from you. If they find information that is incorrect, they will not trust you, and will not want to buy from you.

Most internet surfers are pretty impatient. A site like this one won't keep the average visitor's attention long enough to read the logo.

Your website is your voice in the internet world. It's that crucial first impression, it's your sales pitch, it's your brochure and it's your commercial. In many cases, it is your only sales representative! Make sure that it represents you in a flattering light, is helpful and courteous, and answers all of your customer's questions. You'd fire a sales rep that gave a bad impression of your company. Your website is no less important!

SEO - A Short Course

SEO - A Short Course
by Affiliate Official - http://affiliateofficial.com

Anyone who does business on the internet today has heard of SEO (search engine optimization), and many have tried their hand at it themselves. Most find, however, that they don’t get much response from their efforts. This leads to a dilemma for a start-up business: Is there any way to capitalize on internet traffic without paying big bucks for a professional SEO?

The answer is, yes and no. As with anything in business, you can’t get something for nothing, and most people who own top listings for competitive search engine keywords have either worked very hard to accomplish it or have paid a professional SEO firm dearly. However, there are some simple things that can help make your new website more friendly not only to search engines, but also to your customers:

1. Remember that your customers always come first! Make your site easy to use and easy to buy from, and you will win a loyal following. Simple, straightforward sites perform best all around. Clearly labeled navigation, informative page content, secure online purchasing and ease of ordering are some key elements to a successful website.

2. The KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Silly. Remember that not every potential customer has broadband internet, many surf the web behind firewalls which will not allow downloads, many have vision problems, and many do not have sound cards. Your pages should load quickly and cleanly in any browser (the most commonly used resolution is 1024 x 768), your content and navigation should be in a larger type (font size 2 or greater, 10px or greater), and don’t rely on Flash movies, sound, or downloads.

3. Your index/home page is hands-down your most important page, for search engines and visitors alike. You have 10 seconds or less to convince someone to stay on your website. Give them a brief text summary of your company, your website, and your products/services. Two or three paragraphs is plenty; save the detail for the inner pages.

4. Do use meta tags, but use them properly! Meta tags consist of the title, description, and keywords, although there are other tags possible. For SEO, the 3 listed are the most important. Keep them simple and brief. The search engines that still use them have character limits, and also have strict spam rules, so don’t use a keyword more than once. Be specific: “insurance” is unlikely to get you any rankings, but “California life insurance” might, as it is a less competitive term.

5. Don’t use frames. Frames are a convenience for designers, but most search engines hate them, and so do most site visitors.

6. Collect as little information as possible. Minimizing the information you collect helps in two ways: (1) Potential customers may be uncomfortable about providing you too much information about themselves, such as a Social Security number, or if they have children. (2) The content in a form does not help with SEO, so less of it helps your true content look more important.

7. Make sure your site has at least 5 pages of content. Search engines reward you for “site depth”. Many internet consumers will look for certain pages such as the About Us page and Testimonials; these help lend credibility which helps convert to sales, while giving you solid site content. However make sure you tactfully work in your primary key words into every page.

8. Every page should, ideally, link to every other page. This makes the site very easy for your visitors to use, and gives the search engine spiders a road map. When possible, increase the value of your text links: Instead of “Contact Us”, use “Contact the Women’s Network”.

9. If your site is dynamic, make sure you still have a few static pages. Many search engines still can’t “crawl” dynamic pages, so they can’t give you ranking for them. Your index page and your basic informative pages should be in static text.

10. Avoid anything “tricky” like hidden text, pages of irrelevant links, or spamming your site in any way. These tricks are well known, and if you’re caught, you will be sentenced to search engine Siberia!

Following these simple rules won’t guarantee you top search engine rankings, but they will help you to create a website that is informative, easy for your customers to use, and contains the key elements that search engines require. For more detailed SEO instruction, please review the Internet Marketing Guidebook located at http://imguidebook.com.

SEO offers some of the best ROI in advertising for many industries, when done properly. If the time comes when you are ready to go after internet market more aggressively, don’t be afraid to put in the time needed to perform SEO well. If you are compelled to hire a professional SEO firm, just do your homework first; as with many other industries, internet marketing has its share of companies that make unrealistic promises. A little research can save you from a bad experience, and make sure you get the most value for your money!