Browsing Category: "Affiliated Marketing"
If you’re one of those people that despise celebrities, well, I’m not asking you to like them. But building a celebrity website is definitely worth it if you’re looking to make some extra money on the side. Plus, it doesn’t take too long to build one and more than likely you won’t have to do any maintenance to it.
If you’re wondering why you should build one, well, it can work wonders if you’re doing it right. I have a few celebrity websites in which I did a one-time setup and I haven’t touched it since. As of right now, I’m making, on average, a couple dollars a day for each website and like I said, I haven’t touched them since I first set it up.
Now, you’re probably thinking “a couple dollars a day? That’s nothing! Give me a break man!” That may be true but if you learn to rinse and repeat the process then those couple of dollars a day could turn into $10/day… then $20/day… $100/day… and who knows, maybe thousands?
And did I mention you don’t have to touch the site ever again and you will get a check once a month?
On top of that, I heard celebrity sites are pretty good to convert affiliate campaigns, particularly the zip and e-mail submit ones. Hey, I’m not the one to judge but I heard that people who go to those types of websites are generally the same ones that think they can magically win a new iPod or TV by entering in their e-mail address.
Okay, so hopefully I have your attention enough to this point. Now let me tell you how to go about building a celebrity website.
Pick Out Your Featured Celebrity – Think of each celebrity as its own niche, its own site. You can pick any celebrity you want, just as long as they’re popular enough to be searched for. (And even if they’re a D-list celeb, there are tons of people still searching for them)
If you want to check if they’re actually being searched for, try going to Google Trends and simply typing in their name. If a graph appears, you have some people searching for them.
Find The Keywords Around Your Celebrity – Your celebrity’s name is good for a keyword but more than likely it’s highly competitive with thousands/millions of other websites. You want to focus more on the long-tail keywords instead. Try simply entering in their name in the SEO Book Keyword Tool and you’ll end up with tons of long-tail keywords.
Just like the latest trends, holidays are things you should be taking advantage of annually. And with that said, Thanksgiving is here and of course, Black Friday!
For those of you guys that celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday, I want to say Happy Thanksgiving! And for those that do not, at least eat all the traditional foods, especially if you’re going over someone else’s house and eating for free!
But with that said, all online entrepreneurs should (and most already do) take advantage of holidays to make some extra cash as well as build tons of traffic to their sites via search engines. And here are a couple of things you can/should do.
Take the Hottest Deals and Benefit From Them – If you don’t know about Black Friday, well, it’s probably the craziest shopping day throughout the U.S. Essentially, Black Friday is the day for the best deals for products and the cheapest deals you can find. I mean, people wait in lines for hours before stores even open. This is where you can use it to your benefit.
We’ll start with taking the hottest deals and how it can help you with tons of traffic. First, you find a hot product that everyone wants to buy. You can simply do this by going to any of the major store websites. We’ll use Bestbuy.com as our example.
Once you go to Bestbuy.com, right on the frontpage it shows what’s for sale. If not, you can also try clicking on their weekly ad sales to see other products. But since it was just Black Friday and Thanksgiving, they still have the holiday sales on there.
The following is a paid review in my honest opinion. Being paid is good but it does not influence the review. If you’re interested in a review of your site or product, please visit my advertising page.
Move out the way MarketLeverage, you have some competition on your hands! MotiveInteractive is the latest affiliate network taking over the Blogosphere, as you can see from the tons of reviews on every other blog.
Luke, my affiliate manager, was nice enough to contact me regarding a review and I would just like to say that I’m sorry it took so long to post. But let’s get into the pros and cons I have seen just playing around with MotiveInteractive.
MotiveInteractive has been around since 2004, which is still fairly new but they’ve recently upgraded to Advent 2.0 and the dashboard and interface is probably one of the best that I have seen.
They’re still in the process of upgrading the specifics so anything and everything you would need when it comes to organization in affiliate marketing will be in your hands as of December.
One of the first things I noticed when I logged in was the easy filtering of all the available campaigns. Unlike other affiliate networks I have seen, Motiveinteractive has a very easy to sort module I can definitely work with.
So if you wanted to narrow down a search to campaigns related to computers that has a payout more than $25 specifically for search marketing, all it takes is three simple clicks.
Also, if you wanted specific campaigns to show up right as you login to your account so you can track them easily, you can do that as well. That way you don’t have to bob and weave through the entire system to see your stats, it will be right in front of you as you sign in.
Personally, the easier everything is for me (or you), the more likely I’d want to continue on that path. Plus, who really wants a complicated system in which it takes forever to find a campaign to your liking?
Honestly, that’s just the dashboard stuff and again, it’s not even finished 100%, it should be even better with more campaigns next month!
And to think, I didn’t even get to the good stuff just yet. MotiveInteractive has the highest payouts of any affiliate network out there. And if you find any network that offers a better price, they will go above and beyond just to beat it. I have never even heard of an affiliate network that does that! Have you?
In addition to the highest payouts and topping off any competitor, it looks like their referral commission percentage just topped the previous leader, MarketLeverage. Last time I checked, Marketleverage was at 5% commission, but MotiveInteractive is kicking it at 5.5% GROSS revenue lifetime.
That .5% might not seem much but if you refer someone making six figures a month, your pockets will get bigger and bigger for doing absolutely nothing!
Just like the referral program, they also have an interesting and profitable rewards program. If I read right, they pay you 1% of your previous month’s commission and it increases to 2% the higher the tier.
If you’re making $100,000 in commission each month, you’re getting an extra $1,000 in your pockets!
If you need help with anything, your affiliate manager is always available to answer your questions. I haven’t had a chance to talk to them via instant messenger but last time I e-mailed Luke, I swear he replied to me within the hour. That’s pretty quick if you ask me.
Feel free to check out this video below just for a simple tour through the system. That way you can see proof on how easy it is to navigate!
Anyways, sign up with MotiveInteractive because it’s definitely worth it!
If you’re going to jump into affiliate marketing, eventually you’re going to need some landing pages to promote your products. Although, it is not required, it will definitely benefit you more in the long run; especially if you do not want to do PPC advertising for it. So, an easy way of creating a landing page is simply using the Wordpress platform for it.
I have done this a few times before and it has worked just fine. But I have also seen a few other people who have done it and the landing page just looked HORRIBLE! And when I say that it looked bad, these people didn’t even bother changing the default header and sidebar stuff.
Anyways, here’s a quick step-by-step if you’re going to build a quick landing page using the Wordpress platform.
1. Select a template – Personally, I usually go with a one-column template with no sidebars because you want your landing page to get straight to the point with no other distractions. I mean, it’s called a landing page for a reason… they land on your page and then they purchase whatever product you’re trying to sell.
2. Customize design for the specific product – If your product is “How to make money using Craigslist” eBook or something, at least make the header and sidebar related to it. The customized design doesn’t even have to be perfect, but at least change the name of the default template you’re using.
3. Create a few pages – Now remember, I said "pages" and not "posts." You have to have some content on your page, especially if you plan on using PPC advertising to get traffic. All you need is five pages with some content (it doesn’t have to be much). You can simply have a page with FAQs, testimonials on the product, TOS, etc.
Most of that additional information is just for show (for Google) and you’ll be basically copying and pasting generic TOS pages anyways. Just remember to change the fine lines so it matches up with your site.
But the main page you want to create is what shows up on the homepage of your site. It should be an overview of the product and why people should buy it.
4. Activating the necessary plugins – Wordpress is there to make our lives easier when creating websites so you’ll just need a few plugins but nothing special. I would say an SEO plugin, Sitemaps plugins, affiliate cloaking, Google analytics, etc. Just the basic ones that will help you with AM.
There you have the basics of creating a landing page with Wordpress. It doesn’t have to be perfect or all glamorous, all it needs to do is get traffic and convert. I will be writing a future post on some pros and cons as to why you should have landing pages.
Also, you can also use this simple format when creating niche Adsense sites as well.
Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer!
A lot of you guys know that I recently jumped back into playing with affiliate marketing after procrastinating with it for a long time. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a hands-on type-of-person and that’s the best way for me to learn and remember things so my main advice is to just jump into it and learn as you go.
But before you do, here are a few things that I learnt from affiliate marketing so far. Don’t make some really stupid mistakes I have made. But also, I have learnt some interesting things I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t jump into action instead of just letting my words do all the talking.
1. Keyword research is key to PPC affiliate marketing – If you’ve mastered keyword research then PPC affiliate marketing should be that much easier for you. Most of it is finding the best keywords that convert at the cheapest price and narrowing down your selection to the best ones.
2. Put “{keyword}” at the end of your affiliate links – I read about this and it definitely helps you a lot with PPC marketing. When you type in {keyword} (type it exactly as shown), it lets you track what keywords your visitors are coming from, which ones convert, and so on. This will definitely help you narrow down which keywords aren’t converting for you.
Ask your affiliate manager where to find it and if you need help with it.
3. Always read the TOS for each affiliate network – Most affiliate networks have similar TOS and guidelines but you always want to remember to read it carefully because if you screw up, you might lose more than just your money you’ve earned.
4. Be careful with your marketing techniques (especially with social networking sites) – Like I said previously, make sure you read the TOS of your affiliate network carefully. For instance, when doing search marketing, Market Leverage has one for social media and bulletin boards:
Social Media and Bulletin Boards. MarketLeverage strictly forbids the use of social media profiles (e.g., Facebook or MySpace) and bulletin boards (e.g., Craigslist) to advertise or distribute Search Marketing Content. Notwithstanding the foregoing, this does not preclude You from purchasing keywords which reside on social media websites to advertise and distribute Search Marketing Content.
5. Keywords you cannot bid on – Did you know you can’t bid on certain keywords such as “diet pills” unless you have a pharmaceutical license? Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. There are plenty more keywords like that, and you wonder why those keywords were so low when you were bidding for them, huh?
6. Quality Scores suck – If you don’t know what quality score is, it’s basically a ranking system for Google to determine if you have enough content on your site/landing page. If your landing page doesn’t meet their criteria and requirements then more than likely your bids for the keywords for those campaigns will be extremely higher than normal.
