Can you make BIG money in Affiliate Marketing?

Yes, you can! Paul from Uber Affiliate just put up a new site compiling some of the pictures and earnings from a few large affiliates over at S.eriously.com. Those checks and earnings reports can certainly be motivating (Granted there is some discussion and debate over how many are real and how many are...touched up). But either way, as a firm, AMWSO has issued some big checks over the past few years. Of course these aren't generally net earnings, as a lot of that traffic might have been paid for via paid search ads. So even though an affiliate gets a check for say $100,000, they might have to pay $99,000 to Google, Yahoo or MSN for search advertising. Then of course, there is this other tried and true method of "earning big money via onlne marketing" :)

However, who can argue with an extra $1000 in the pocket. Plus, there can be ancillary benefits. Imagine if you're paying for all of those search ads on a credit card that gives cash back, or rewards points. 99,000 rewards points can add up to some nice all paid vacations in a short amount of time, or cash back, or any other benefits offered by credit card companies.

How can you start earning some of these monster checks? It isn't easy, but it's attainable, however it does take effort and work to build sustainable protected earnings.

The first thing to do, is to decide what product and how you'll be promoting a product or program. Basically you can make a niche site that is content focused, or a more general type of site like a coupon site or reward site.

If you decide to go with a niche site, then you must decide on what that niche is. There are various recommended ways of deciding on a niche, some advise to start off doing keyword research. I would recommend to start writing down some topics that interest you. At least, while you're learning to be an elite affiliate marketer, you'll also be learning about a subject that inspires you. Find some affiliate programs centered around these niches, sign up, and ask the affiliate manager for a keyword list. Then do a bit of keyword research to see what kind of traffic the recommended keywords are getting. See if you can come up with your own long-tail keywords using the provided list as a base. I would do a review of keyword tools here, but I don't think I could be more comprehensive that this keyword tool review by Aaron Wall.

In another post here, we'll talk about what kind of costs you might incur when investing in a keyword tool, getting a web host, getting some design help, and promoting your site.

If looking for program ideas, sign up for one of the AMWSO programs and get some help from one of the AMWSO managers to get you on the fast track to receiving one of those monster checks!

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Performance Marketing Support Group re-launches Monthly Teleconference for Internet Retailers and Marketing Professionals

Every 3rd Wednesday of the month, at 4:00pm Eastern Time, Allan Dick from Vintage Tub & Bath and Jeff Molander host a conference call to help e-marketing and e-commerce professionals find solutions to any issues or problems faced on a daily basis. Issues are discussed amongst peers, and advice will be offered from industry experts on the call.

This is a great opportunity to hear what your peers are facing, and listen to new insights on solutions to problems. The call on February 20th will center around the debate on how to balance paid search with affiliate marketing strategies. We at AMWSO are certainly keen to listen to the thoughts of other retailers and consultants on this very hot topic.

The monthly calls are a life blood for me. As the sole person charged with e-commerce marketing management at a mid-sized multi-channel retailer, I need a support group that speaks my language,

- Trish Tickle of Kitchen Collection.

Even after the call finishes, participants are invited to join a web based discussion group to network and continue helping one another. Trish continues:

Networking with other affiliate managers lets me find out about new ideas, explore and ask questions about things that I don t have time to research completely. Between calls we can email each other or the whole group about issues that can t wait until the next call. In fact, just yesterday we were discussing international affiliate marketing.

To sign up for the call, contact: Allan Dick at allan@vintagetub.com.

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Valentines Day for Affiliates

Next to Christmas, Valentine's Day is one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year. Close to a billion dollars will be spent for Valentine's day, and affiliates are in an excellent position to grab a piece of the pie. Most of the shopping is done the week prior to the 14th of February, with another surge occurring just a couple days before the day as shoppers search for those last minute ideas and gifts.

The expected usual suspects: jewelry, flowers, chocolate and other gifts are the hottest items for the Valentine's Holiday.  Thankfully, most respective merchants have affiliate programs in all of these niches.  Men average over $100 spending for the holiday, with woman averaging just over $50. While it's true that many people are actually turned off by the commercialization of this day, 30% of people surveyed by the NPD Group appreciate the romance of the day, and 8% are pressured into making a purchase, "so they don't get into trouble."

Jewelry and the like will be the most promoted items, however do consider that women might also be making purchases for men. Also consider, once people are prompted into a "buying mood", anything might get purchased for anyone, including purchases for oneself!  According to Google checkout, 50% of people shopping for Valentine's Day make multiple purchases.  According to the National Retail Federation, 22.4 percent of men and 7.3 percent of women plan to purchase jewelry.

AMWSO runs several jewelry and fashion programs that are positioned well for the Valentine's holiday. We've set up a special Valentine's Day Affiliate Programs page to highlight the specials, deals and offers that are being promoted just for Valentine's Day.

This is really the last gift giving holiday until Mother's Day in the USA (although some people gift for Easter), so gear up, get those banners, links, promotions and coupons posted!

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Digging Deeper into the Affiliate Webspace with Syntryx

Affiliate marketing companies are starting to wake up to Syntryx, the game-changing data analysis tool that's been on the scene for over a year. A powerful data collection and mining tool, Syntryx allows users to scour the web sphere for high performing existing affiliates and potential affiliate targets.

What does Syntryx do?

The great thing about Syntryx: it is actually a search engine and web crawler. It crawls the web with an eye out for things affiliate recruiters, media buyers, and SEO experts would be specifically looking for. However, that's only part of the value, once all of the data is collected in the Syntryx database, powerful data mining and analysis tools are provided that allow users to judge the force (reach/traffic/value) of a domain, identify all the domains held by a particular webmaster or company, analyze what other offers or programs are being promoted on an affiliate's site, and this is just scratching the surface.

How can users benefit from using Syntryx?

It is pretty easy to dive straight in and started mining the database for affiliate sites in particular program niches. AMs can target sites that already have affiliate links based on keywords the site ranks for, or even search for same/similar niche specific affiliate links anywhere in web sphere. All affiliate managers know the well-known top affiliate sites, but now Syntryx allows affiliate managers to see if a particular affiliate has another less well-known niche site that might fit perfectly with a particular program niche. These are just a couple uses specifically related to affiliate marketing. Affiliate managers can now also provide valuable information to clients useful in  competitor analysis, SEO and paid search campaigns.

For our own clients we certainly see the value extracted from this tool when combined with expert and experienced analysis provided by AMWSO managers. We know our investment will be quickly returned with interest.

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Will Affiliate Marketing Evolve?

Recently, there was a merchant who was outed on Abestweb for trying to entice affiliates into providing a non-affiliate link back to the merchant site in exchange for a 1/2 percent commission bonus. This practice was summarily criticized by affiliates, and the merchant was forced to withdraw the offer, make several apologies and replace the consultant responsible for the idea.

I think there were basically three camps of reasoning's behind the negative acceptance of this idea. 1) People were slighted at only being offered 0.5% commission increase for this valuable rank benefiting link back. 2) People felt that this idea was unethical search engine manipulation and 3) some people felt that the affiliate marketing program shouldn't be mixed in with the SEO strategy.

Reason #3 inspired me to think about how affiliate marketing will evolve in the future. I think the idea of keeping affiliate marketing as is, and not mixing it up with other online marketing efforts is going to be impossible to maintain in the near future. The perception of affiliate marketing is under assault and this assault is leading merchants to seek additional ways to gain the best value value from their affiliate programs.  The assault is coming from trademark bidders and parasitic affiliates and even coupon affiliates (not to question the overall value of coupon affiliates, just observing that SOME merchants question the value of coupon affiliates). Affiliate marketing is a great channel, it provides a measurable ROI, builds out brand presence, and employs some very creative individuals working for the benefit of a brand. Given the tremendous value affiliate marketing offers however, there will always be a trend by any business to seek more value out of a channel.

How can an affiliate channel demonstrate NEW value-add while under this constant assault from non-value adding affiliate enterprises? I think the misguided link back idea was an attempt at addressing this idea. While it was resoundingly criticized, it was an attempt at adding something new to the affiliate channel.

Can affiliates be asked reasonably to get involved in other marketing endeavors on behalf of a merchant?  Perhaps commission bonuses for helping to vote up an article on a social site? Generating comments and content to help with spin reputation management?  If it's true that the affiliates of a merchant are like an independent sales force can this sales force be employed further for the benefit of both the affiliate and the merchant?

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US Bank Visa Not Allowing Internet Purchases

Lee Odden over at his Online Marketing Blog has related a story where a major bank is not allowing purchases made with it's credit card over the internet. It's not as if affiliates have enough factors getting in the way of them earning their rightful commissions. Factors including cookie blocking, parasiteware, cookie stuffers, failed tracking and other factors. However, now if credit card companies force consumers to call a company to complete an online transaction, this will certainly have an impact on affiliate sales.

Affiliates and the major affiliate networks need to be aware of this, and keep an eye on the trend. US Bank is not small, and it's a pretty narrow view they are taking in the name of "security." I certainly hope they start to see the light as they lose consumers and transactions as consumers reject this inconvenience, as Lee had done.

Just to note, I tried to contact the PR team listed on the US Bank web site for a comment and response, and sent emails to Steve Dale, Teri Charest, Amy Frantti, and Lisa Clark, but did not receive any replies.

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2007 AMWSO Year in Review

2007 was a year of innovation and evolution for AMWSO, and especially toward the end of the year, the door was opened for some exciting developments and opportunities in 2008.

In 2007 we launched over 10 new programs, including Baghaus, Ecampus, Sonoma Diet, Jillian Michaels, along with several more. We had great success with these launches along with the affiliates who joined up and started promoting them. We helped Ecampus have their best year ever during the back to school season, and we helped Baghaus spread their brand and become a premier handbag focused merchant. Diet season is starting right now, and we have primed our diet and fitness programs for affiliate to reap the whirlwind in January and February.

We had tremendous success in regard to innovations using affiliate videos with the Gaiam program. Our client Gaiam won the prestigious 2007 LinkShare Golden Link "Innovative Merchant Of The Year" Award due to affiliate trackable video files that we helped introduce.

We also met with some challenges in 2007. One particular program that we launched for an air filtration and water filtration system proved very challenging. We learned that having an outstanding product was not enough to make a program successful. Brand marketing support is needed along with an affiliate program, so that not only the public learns about a product, but the affiliates become more familiar as well. All of the cogs connect when building a successful affiliate program, including paid search initiatives, natural search and media buying.

In recognition of this, we introduced new services to offer our merchant partners in 2007.  Services including PPC Management, Social Media Marketing and SEO Services. We're especially excited about our Social Media Marketing service, as there are few companies out there that can do this as well and as effectively as AMWSO. When compared to CPM banner advertising, Social Media marketing can achieve volumes more "bang for the buck." This effectiveness should not only be measured in terms of raw traffic numbers, but targeted and engaged traffic.

Toward the end of the year, AMWSO announced it's affiliation with Syntryx. Syntyx is a powerful tool allowing AMWSO to delve deeper into the web to find great affiliate partners and to help our merchant partners better understand where their traffic comes from and use this as a competitive advantage. I'll be writing much more about Syntryx in a blog entry in January.

The core team at AMWSO remained unchanged throughout the year, and we're excited and motivated going into 2008. We have new ideas that we'll be working on to grow our partners businesses, and we'll be bringing on some great new partners in the coming months.  Definitely stay tuned to this blog for some great stuff in 2008!

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Affiliate Links vs. Adsense

Mark over at 45n5.com asks a very common question we hear; which is better, having Adsense on a page or utilizing affiliate links? My advice would be that it completely depends on the type of page you are designing. If it's a topic that people are gathering information, or doing some research, then Adsense would seem to fit.

One of Mark's commenter's noted that they had a luxury homes page up where affiliate links didn't do very well, however Adsense earned quite a bit of money. This would make sense, as I don't imagine many people would click on an affiliate link and make any purchase related to luxury homes just from a website.

Now, if you are designing a page targeting people who are in a buying mood, well this is where the affiliate links become very powerful. If you design your site as a funnel, directing people to make a purchase through affiliate links, this should be more effective than simply putting up Adsense ads. If you have a page with a bunch of informational content and articles, then try out Adsense. Give people something to click on in their search for more information.

In either case, if one isn't working out well for you, nothing other than a little effort prevents you from trying out the other.

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Dominating a Niche in Affiliate Marketing

David Wilson made a post over at Social Media Optimization (a blog I frequently visit now that AMWSO has started offering social media consulting services), talking about the approach used by one SEO for reputation management, I felt that many of the same principles can be applied to affiliate marketing toward dominating the search results for a particular niche. Why be satisfied with simply achieving a high search engine placement for particular keywords. Why not aim for owning 5, or 10 slots, and target that consumer from many angles to definitely make a purchase through your affiliate links.

If you have a site or page targeted toward particular key words within a niche, do you have a Squidoo page to compliment your main landing page?  Have you set-up a blog on a different domain, or a blog hosting service? How about a Myspace page, or Hubpage, or Wetpaint Wiki or PBWiki?

Build up some support pages, interlink them, and dominate the search results in a particular niche.

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Word of Mouth Marketing and Affiliate Marketing

If you're involved in marketing, then you know the latest trend receiving much discussion involves conversation marketing and word of mouth marketing. Affiliate marketing never seems to get a lot of respect from other marketing designations, but I believe affiliate marketing can fit perfectly within the new conversation paradigm.

Conversation / word of mouth marketing is getting a lot of attention because it's effective. The world is interactive, and large corporations must adjust. It's almost as if we're taking a step back, to the neighborhood business, where you could  go right up to a store owner and manager, and discuss any issue. Now large corporations have to adopt back to this role on a global scale. The Internet is truly making us a global village. Additionally, word of mouth is not something new, but now the marketing world is waking up to the power of people that has been extended by the Internet.

I would put forth that any business with an army of happy and motivated affiliates is much better positioned to get into the conversation than a company without. All it takes is leveraging the relationship with the true value-adding affiliates by treating them as true partners.

Part of the bad rap that affiliate marketing earned for itself has come from the desire to drive hard revenue growth via the channel. The affiliate concept began as a way to bring new customers to a business. It evolved into a pure sales growth vehicle via rewards sites, trademark targeting search affiliates and even coupon sites. It has been argued that these type of sites really add no value to the brand and the marketing experience, thus the whole of affiliate marketing gets relegated to some sort of grey area in marketing circles.

Affiliate marketing has the potential to come out of the grey. Consider the idea of using an affiliate program as a means to approach your brand advocates and customer enthusiasts. Consider by bringing them into the affiliate program, it provides an additional means of feeling a part of the company/culture and environment. Now consider the potential impact on "the conversation" that all of these motivated brand enthusiasts can have.

A well run, balanced affiliate program will already have content based, value adding affiliates as well. These affiliates are already involved in the conversation. Build that relationship with them, harness the power of word of mouth, and get your message our onto more waves, for more people to experience.

Affiliate marketing is not a new concept, but it can be adopted to the marketing 2.0 world with incredible results. If you don't have an affiliate marketing program, consider starting one today. Not only will you receive cost-effective sales, but it' a a channel by which to jump into "The Conversation."

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Commission Junction Damaging the Future of Affiliate Marketing!

If you're an affiliate marketer or read affiliate blogs, then you must have heard that Spybot Search and Destroy is now immunizing it's users against CJ links. Any Spybot user using this immunization feature will be lead to an error page after clicking a CJ link. No chance for a sale to be made for the affiliate, no affiliate cookie is ever set.

CPA-Affiliates wrote a blog article breaking this story and Shoemoney also wrote a nice follow-up. In the comments many people call on CJ to "fight against the Spybot program" or address / correct this issue with Spybot. I suggest CJ would do much better to address the root reason why these spyware protection programs block CJ/affiliate cookies.

Anyone in the industry knows that CJ permits too many shady practice affiliates to operate on their network. Much of an affiliate manager's daily activity with a program on CJ revolves around weeding out bad affiliates. Bad affiliates that are using shady practices such as browser hijacking through toolbars, cookie stuffing, forced redirects and forced clicks. Lip-service is paid to the CJ terms of service written against these practices, but true enforcement is passive and minimal at best. The short-term benefit from the added commission revenue just seems too tempting on a broad network-wide scale. However, short-term shady profit acquisition will damage the long-term health of the affiliate industry. Affiliate marketing's reputation will further slip toward the perception of shady/bad business.

Affiliate networks need to follow the Shareasale example, and clean up their act. Networks are making a few extra dollars now, but what happens when Google / Yahoo / Firefox / Spybot etc., start using this justification to block affiliate links and cookies on a much wider scale? What happens when merchants start taking a hard look at the bottom line and realize that shady affiliates are cannibalizing other sales channels and start bailing out of their programs in droves? Poor perceptions can quickly outweigh the perception of value found from hard-working, true value adding affiliates.

Clean up your act CJ, and gain further leverage with Spybot and other spyware programs to stop blocking affiliate links. Even a small step such as providing full click source data to merchants to view and audit could carry a long way toward cleaning things up.

If you have a program on CJ that is infested with bad affiliates and poor performance / ROI, consider seeking the services of an outsourced affiliate program manager before terminating your program.

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