Most of the newbie question in affiliate marketing is about how to promote their own affiliate offer? I usually respond by giving them some short list of different tactics and strategies that I use in my own campaigns.

If you look at the Affiliate Marketing Basics Page here, the no.7 step is promoting. It’s kinda vague to think about it since promoting affiliate offers is a wide topic. That’s why there has never been a scarcity of this topic online. Affiliate bloggers never run out of posts in tackling this and it’s a continuous debate over and over.

It’s limitless because for instance, when you talk about pay-per click marketing, you can talk about several variations on how to do it effectively. You can also include copywriting inside it where there are another heap of variations. And we’re not even into different PPC networks yet and their differences in their own rules.

Overwhelmed by now? It’s normal. In the next few days I’m going to carve out a post about a huge list of different ways on promoting your affiliate offers and in each ways, I would try to be as comprehensive as possible. Stay tuned.

(Sorry for leaving you hanging)

In affiliate marketing, you can easily distinguish the experts from the noobs. Most newbies don’t do tracking. In fact and surprisingly, they don’t even seem to know how to track and don’t show any interests in tracking. Probably one of the many reasons why most “affiliate marketers” doesn’t really make money with affiliate marketing.

Tracking is essential, just like testing and tweaking, it helps us do well and improve our own campaigns. By tracking, we come to have an idea of what is working and what’s not working w/c will then give us the opportunity to tweak.

There are several tools that you can use to track your own affiliate marketing campaigns but you don’t need to use a lot. If you are with Pay-per click networks like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search and MSN Ad Center, you can already have that built-in tracking with them because they have the data, although only basic tracking.

You can also make good use of Google Analytics if you have landing page for the product that you intend to build in for long term. Besides being free, you also get to enjoy all the add-on tools that the Analytics provide.

Lastly, there is an awesome service known as Tracking202. It’s amazingly free and it’s a very reliable service that can pretty much do advance tracking for your campaigns. You can either opt to use the free hosted version or the premium self-hosted version (needs a dedicated server). Unlike analytics, tracking202 is nearly real-time with its flawless tracking and I don’t know any other program that does tracking superbly combined with reliability and affordable cost than the 202 product. It’s also fully integrated with the major pay-per click networks so you’ll not have any issue with it.

Not tracking is a murderous crime in affiliate marketing. Do not think I am over-exaggerating things here. If you’re not tracking your campaigns yet then start doing so now, and you will be ahead of many other marketers. What say you?

So as you may probably see, affiliatehat.com is testing out different logos and trying to suit out what’s best for the blog. Obviously the former logo was not professionally suitable enough for it to mainly promote the brand and leave a lasting impression to the readers.

My preference with the logo design is a simple text-based logo with a hat icon in it. The color schemes, inclusion of a tagline and a professional font is what we are trying to discuss by now. If you happened to have any suggestions or critical insights and stufss, kindly fire them away!

In my last post entitled there’s no best product to promote in affiliate marketing, I explained why there really is no product that can make you tons of money that easy. I emphasized the essence of testing and tweaking in affiliate marketing and how it can literally make or break your business. For today, I would like to contradict that thought a bit by talking about profiting from the latest trends.

What is a hot trend? Ok I will not quote a definition from some stupid ass resource site. Hot trends are simply the ones that are being talked about a lot (yes it speaks volume) and that people are willing to spend for it. In short, if an anime is getting a lot of buzz it doesn’t really mean it’s automatically profitable.

Some Good example of Hot trends

One good example is the recent buzz around Apple’s iPad. Because Apple finally released some info about it, it opened a profitable market for people, what is it? Email Submits! Just by surfing through PeerFly, I easily noticed an offer paying $1.20 per lead (email only) with a VERY high conversion rate of 40% (it obviously went down afterwards).

Another good example a long time ago is the Obama, McCain related offers. During the presidential campaigns, a lot of merchants and affiliate alike are cashing in through this trend simply because it was the “in” thing.

You may probably be thinking about saturation and stuffs but remember saturation and competition is good because it signifies there’s a money in that market.  More competition means more money.

How to Find the Hot Trends

People do it differently and I’m amazed on how a lot of marketers get creative with this. But for the blog’s audience and nature I will discuss the basic ways.

Twitter

Twitter is the top social media tool and just by searching for surging topics that are lasting a bit longer, you can already have your offers to promote. What I usually do is go to sites like TweetMeme and find the hottest post. After that I’ll match that with a certain offer.

Google Trends

Google Trends is the best tool for finding the latest buzz search-wise.  There’s a good comprehensive post on how to maximize the use of this tool located here.

Blog-Hopping

It does make sense actually to explore the big sites in the blogosphere to find what’s hot. I usually browse big and authority sites like TechCrunch, Mashable and etc to find out what’s kicking in.

How about you? Do you care about hot trends when doing your own affiliate marketing stuffs? Let me know!

You probably have noticed right now that there is that ugly eBook located at the header of this site. That is actually the free stuff given if you subscribe to AffiliateHat Dot Com’s newsletter.  You get the info product for free, plus you are subscribed to the weekly newsletter which will give out awesome tips that will accelerate your learning on affiliate marketing. Do take note that the newsletter contents are the ones that are not published (and will never be published) in this blog.

What is Affiliate Marketing Manifesto?

Affiliate Marketing Manifesto is like a general guide in affiliate marketing which is newbie-friendly. The book is written with the audience in mind so if you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing then you are probably the best person for this. It’s 25-page eBook which hands out no fluff, all pure meat content.

This is what is inside the Manifesto:

• Affiliate Marketing Introduced

• The 3 Things All Affiliate Marketers Need To Survive Online

• How To Become A Super Affiliate In Niche Markets

• So Many Affiliate Programs! Which One Do I Choose?

• Which Affiliate Networks To Look Out For When Promoting

• Easy Profits Using PPC In Your Affiliate Marketing Business

• Using Product Recommendations To Increase Your Bottom Line

• Using Camtasia to Increase Your Affiliate Checks

• Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

• How To Avoid The 3 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes

Go now and make sure to grab your copy of affiliate marketing manifesto located at the topmost part of the page.

Ok sorry for being hysterical in the title. By now you should already know that there is no such thing as secret in affiliate marketing. Or to be more specific, a secret that would literally explode your profits. Again affiliate marketing is all about testing and tweaking and the more you learn from your data, the more you will earn.

Before, it’s very easy to profit from Facebook. All you need to do is run that shady email submit and get it in front of as many as audience as possible. Time flies very fast and now with all those new terms, a lot of people find making money from Facebook impossible.

If you get lazy to do a good ad copy, most of the times it will just get rejected. Even if you do a good copy, sometimes it will get rejected even. The key there is by getting into the smallest niche or what is called microniches.

A good example. If you’re going to run a quiz offer where you are going to target literally everyone, target the tag entertainment and have as much people see the ad, are you going to make money? I doubt!

There’s no secret but here’s one thing you’ve got to bare in mind. When you promote something on Facebook, make sure you laser target your audience according to the offer you’re promoting. For instance, if you’re promoting the Avatar Quiz Offer, then target not just the Avatar movie avid fans. Target them by age, whether they’re single or not and stuffs. Do you think a 40 yr.old woman would be interested to take that quiz? I bet not! Or will an 11 year old devoted fan have the money to pay for the subscription? Naah!

At the end of the day, it’s just about simply trying to get as deep as possible. While you may get lesser impressions by doing this, it may literally double your EPC. What are you gonna do with 10 mil impressions and no leads? and on the flip side, how about 10000 impressions and 10 leads? Remember, the more your ad is clicked, the more it will be displayed. And the bottom line is that the cost per click would be much cheaper if you’re ad is getting clicked often.

What say you?

In wickedfire, most of the question is about what is the best product to be an affiliate for? What is the best product to promote? The cliche answer/s is either it depends or there’s no best product to promote. So today I’ll explain a bit what it means and why. Let’s now dissect it.

It depends

People normally base it on the per lead tag, epc, and stuffs. For example two years ago, the ringtone market is a hot commodity. Everyone is in there, everyone’s like making money with it. The truth is only few did. While ringtone is a lucrative niche, the problem is its saturated. To be able to get a position in Adwords or YSM you need to shred out a lot of cash since the cpc is absurdly high.

Last year’s flavor is the rebill offers. If you don’t know, rebills are the ones that the customer just need to pay less than $5 for shipping YET they don’t know its a recurring payment. It’s shady but its how it was really designed. Like ringtones, it’s high paying but I doubt a lot of people made huge money with it. Researching, its obvious that the same and the same people are the ones that make the most of it.

So in the end it depends not just on the price per lead or the rising trends, but also on how suitable it is for your budget.

There’s No Best Product

This is true if you ask me. Every time I log in to my Copeac account, I always see the hot offers and stuffs but I rarely promote those. Sometimes you’d be surprised on how some of the offers work, what’s converting and why its converting.

For instance, I would like to promote a quiz offer which is working in UK. It converts well simply because Im promoting on a different demographic. Maybe not a lot of people promote that offer or promote it in that geographical location.

The thing is you can follow what others do by promoting those hot campaigns and yet still fail badly or promote something unknown, lose money, then capitalize in the end.

Affiliate Marketing is a testing and tweaking business (and spending too). Even the highest converting products will suck if you do your campaigns poorly. And besides if there’s such a best product to promote, why would I tell it to you anyway?

]]> http://www.affiliatehat.com/what-is-the-best-product-to-promote/feed/ 6 http://www.affiliatehat.com/what-is-the-best-product-to-promote/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAffiliateHat/~3/wjxaV-CMHo0/ http://www.affiliatehat.com/key-tip-for-online-success-stop-reading-blogs/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:51:06 +0000 affiliatehat http://www.affiliatehat.com/?p=148

The one main advantage of blogs is that it’s easy to love reading it. Because of it’s intrinsic nature, most people prefer reading blogs rather than the traditional media, newspaper, news sites and etc. Since bloggers are friendly and do prefer to interact with people, a lot of us have just put reading as one of our daily habits.

If you’re reading…

The one main advantage of blogs is that it’s easy to love reading it. Because of it’s intrinsic nature, most people prefer reading blogs rather than the traditional media, newspaper, news sites and etc. Since bloggers are friendly and do prefer to interact with people, a lot of us have just put reading as one of our daily habits.

If you’re reading this article, you probably have heard this tip a lot of times. Stop reading and start implementing. But you’re reading this blog now which means you’re doing the wrong thing? Probably yes or probably no.

If you notice, the people who are telling you that tip are the same people known as bloggers. And bloggers are the ones who produce content and drive as much people as they can to read and read and read. So how is that?

The truth is they don’t really want you not to read their blog anymore, what they want is for you to read their blog and dismiss all the other ones. Sounds bad but that’s the case. YET if you follow that tip, it would benefit you A LOT!

Stopping reading blogs is not really about not reading at all, it’s about lessening your consumption. The problem with most people who love reading is that they consume and consume and consume until they forgot and forgot all the stuffs they’ve read. In whatever business you are, it’s not really them who will move your business, its YOU. So stop blog hopping, stop exploring the blogosphere, stop subscribing to them and start doing your own thing whether it’s affiliate marketing or whatever.

Reading 2-3 blogs a day is good but if reading and reading has become a habit of yours that it starts to hurt your productivity then quit on reading.

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Incentivizing in affiliate marketing also known as incentive marketing is a very popular marketing tactic which is done mostly by website owners that have a huge audience.  Because of its nature, it’s not too hard to thrive and make some reasonable income doing it.

How it is done

Here’s a good example. Thesis theme is probably the hottest Wordpress theme for the last 8 months and because of it, a lot of its affiliates are really doing well with it. So to incentivize Thesis, most people are offering what we call cash back. Thesis offers affiliates a 40% commission for every sale made and what wise affiliates do is share the commission with everyone who will buy under them. And therefore doing the math, instead of earning $35 per sale, the affiliate would make less because he’s going to give some cash back ($10-$15), YET can possibly quadruple his customers. Who wouldn’t want a discount anyways?

There are a lot of other ways to do this like adding something to the package, or giving a premium something as a bundle and many more.

Before doing this and conclusion

First and foremost, make sure the offer is incentivizable. If it’s not then obviously you will just be wasting your time doing it.

Second, make sure you have a good number of audiences and a tight community. You cannot just start a website and then have people believe you that you are really offering cash back. Reputation counts so if you already have an established website then it’s a big plus factor.

Lastly, communicate well with the merchant.  Because of its nature, some will abuse it. You definitely don’t want to give some cash to people who really don’t purchase under you. Have a constant communication with the merchant to make sure everything is running well.

Overall, this is a pretty good tactic. A lot of people are doing it but not a lot of them are being successful. Getting the process implemented properly and good communication with the merchant are the only things you need to get this thing working well. Good luck and tell me your own opinion.

Ok, the last post was September 25. The blog obviously was kinda on a hiatus, doing nothing, having planned nothing and going nowhere. I don’t want to make any excuses. It’s my fault because I’m lame and lazy.

Second, if I am about to promise anything again here don’t believe me. During mid 2009 when this blog had it going, I promised that I would provide free high quality articles and that never happened. So consider me a liar.

Anyways enough on talking. This year we would try to back this site up, provide occasional good tips for affiliate marketing and web news and many more. As you may now this blog was purchased by Melvin and no offense but ever since then its a downward spiral. Melvin is a very busy person, a student and an entrepreneur.

He hired 3 writers and one of them is me, the other two had written couple articles here before and just vanished. So altogether it was all our fault too.

This year, I (or we) will try my best to resuscitate this blog by posting more. As what this blog is about, I would hand out several affiliate marketing tips for newcomers and hopefully get them started and see how it goes then.

The blog would also showcase some case studies to really increase the value of the content that it would hand out to you, readers.

If there’s still a reader of this blog, see you then.