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This is part 1 of Nickycakes’ Affiliate Marketing Newbie Guide. This post will not be new information for almost anyone who has done much of anything with affiliate marketing, but there seem to be plenty of people who don’t know anything about the industry, so feel free to direct them to this post if you’re too lazy to explain.
Often times you will be asked, as Nickycakes is often asked, “What do you do?” When you start making money online, people are generally curious as to exactly how you are doing it. The first time you are asked this, it’s hard to come up with a short answer. Nickycakes generally says something like, “I run an internet marketing company.” If they pry further and ask specificially what that entails, it’s usually, “Companies pay me to run ad campaigns for their products.” (No, Nicky doesn’t refer to himself in the 3rd person when talking to people irl) While Affiliate Marketing is a little more complicated than that, and a lot less glamorous than “running an internet marketing company” implies, that’s pretty much the reality of what you’re doing. Companies pay you a commission to advertise their products.
Of course, when you are asked by a family member to explain what you’re doing, you may have to give them a little more detail. The analogy Nickycakes uses is one that was given to him a while ago by one of his affiliate managers: Let’s say that Coca-Cola wants to sell more Coke. They already have their own ad campaigns running on TV, and possibly the internet. But, they want to sell more. So Coca-Cola sets up a program where anyone who so desires can make their own advertisements for coke products which link to the coke website. For every case of coke sold through one of these links, Coke agrees to pay the “affiliate” $1 commission. Pretty simple.
There are affiliate programs for thousands and thousands of different websites, companies, and products. Amazon.com has an affiliate program where you can link to any product on their website and make a few % commission on anything sold. Ebay the same deal. Lawyers sometimes pay very well for leads forwarded to them since they make so much money per case that they win. Most dating sites will pay for every person who signs up for a free account on their site. With the extremely low risk on the part of the company offering the affiliate program, it’s almost stupid NOT to have one.
So how does Coca-Cola know that the sales are coming from you and not from another guy? Well, they have tracking software set up, and they give you your own link to advertise, like… coke.com/affiliate/12342345 or something, and anyone using that link is kept track if, usually via browser cookies, so that the resulting sales are credited to the proper affiliate.
What’s an Affiliate Network?
Ok, so since affiliate programs have gotten so ridiculously popular, it is easy for companies with such programs to get lost in the crowd. There are hundreds of webhosting providers that offer generous affiliate programs, for example, so going to each one individually to see which one is the best to promote becomes tedious. That’s where Affiliate Networks come in.
An Affilaite Network is just a company that handles the relationship between the company with an affiliate program, and the affiliates. An affiliate can sign up to an Affiliate Network and then select from thousands of different products and services to promote, and can easily see exactly how much they will get paid per sale/lead/signup/whatever. The Affiliate Network handles recruiting and paying the individual affiliates, so they never have to have a direct relationship with the Merchant/Advertiser. In return, the Affiliate Network takes a small(well not always small) cut of the commissions. With enough affiliates sending enough sales, Affiliate Networks get rich just for being a middleman.
So why would you work with an Affiliate Network instead of with the Advertiser directly, knowing that they take a cut of the money you are making? Well, there are a few reasons. First, and most important, is payment terms. A lot of merchants will only agree to pay you Net 30, or worse. This means that after the month is over you need to wait 30 days to be paid for that month’s commissions. This can suck if you’re spending a lot of money on advertising their products and can’t afford to continue for 60 days without being paid. Affiliate Networks generally have much better payment terms, often giving affiliates weekly wire transfer payments if they are generating a decent amount per week (usually around $1000 is the standard threshhold). Also, many Merchants don’t want to deal with a bunch of affiliates, they just want an Affiliate Network to just handle it all for them, so even if you wanted to you couldn’t work with them directly.
Methods of Promotion
Here’s the work part. It is completely up to the affiliate to generate customers to buy these products if they expect to earn some commissions. There are way too many individual methods of promoting websites to even begin listing, but they generally fall into two categories: paid and unpaid promotion.
Unpaid promotion is stuff like SEO, email spam, social network spam, “social media”, “viral marketing”, etc. These unpaid methods of promotion, while basically free (money wise), generally require much more work than their paid counterparts. They also (generally) do not provide nearly as much volume as their paid counterparts. But, they are a good resource for newbies to get started with if they’re broke.
Paid methods of promotion are things like PPC (pay per click), media buys, legit email spam…err…deployment, paying bums to hold up signs at busy intersections, etc. These types of promotion can generally, but not always, generate a ton of traffic if you have the money. They are, however much more risky, since you’re obviously investing your own money with no real guarantee that you’ll see any return on that investment.
PPC and media buying are what Nickycakes does the most of these days, so that is the focus of the majority of the info on this site. He has done his fair share of SEO but it’s rather boring, doesn’t generate enough traffic to be worth the time, and it’s so brainless and monotonous that you could train a monkey to do it. Even blackhat SEO is only fun for a few days after you figure out what you’re doing before the novelty of pushing a button and seeing 10 thousand backlinks showing up completely wears off. Also, Nickycakes has never ever met ANYONE that has gotten rich from SEO. Find someone making 5 figures a day with SEO. Seriously, good luck.
Warning Before Doing Anything
Most people fail. Seriously, don’t quit your dayjob. Don’t drop out of college. Don’t invest any money you aren’t comfortable losing in PPC. If you want to learn how to do online marketing as a fulltime job that supports you financially, please do not make any serious life changes until you’re already making at least twice what you need to live comfortably. Nickycakes spent the first several profitable months as an affiliate working retail and going to class full time.
Seriously, expect to fail, because chances are you’re too stupid or lazy to succeed, which is why the rest of us make so much money.
Why Nickycakes Loves Affiliate Marketing
Nickycakes loves affiliate marketing because it’s not boring, he’s good at it, the rewards are directly related to how much effort is put in, and it provides amazing freedom because there is no boss and there are no employees. Also, the people in the industry are great. When you go to an industry conference for the first time, you really expect a bunch of obvious computer nerds who live in their parents basements, and there are some of those for sure, but mostly everyones pretty cool.
Part 2 will be about setting up tracking.
Published by nickycakes //
As many of you know, Nickycakes will be speaking on the first panel at the upcoming Affililate Summit West in Las Vegas in less than one week. The panel starts at noon next Sunday, and Nicky will be speaking with a few other guys who he has never met. They apparently also do PPC and online marketing type stuff.
The panel is aimed at answering the questions that may be asked by kinda new people to the biz…people with maybe 6 months or so under their belt who are making some money already but would really like to step up their game. It won’t be geared toward newbs who have no idea how to set up a campaign, how to sign up to an affiliate network, how to turn on their computer, how to get to school without their mom putting on their helmet and wheeling them out to the short bus, etc.
If you are attending the session and have any specific questions you would like answered by Nickycakes and/or the other two panelists, please leave them in the comments here and the panel moderator, Andrew Wee, will do his best to include them if he’s not too busy playing virtual pirate games on facebook 17 hours a day.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on September 10th, 2008 in PPC Search
Nickycakes just got a flyer in the mail for SMX East which is a Search Marketing conference from Oct 6th-8th (next month) in NYC. Having never been to a SMX event, the Cakes has no idea what goes on there, what kind of people attend, what the sessions are like etc.
The conference chairperson (the guy who organizes everything) is Danny Sullivan who is the editor in chief at Search Engine Land, and also the guy behind Sphinn.
So, is anyone going, or have you been before, and is it good?
Please comment.
Published by nickycakes //
So it’s 5 am and Nickycakes is just getting the last of his crap together for his trip to LA today. He’ll be back in a week so posting may be sparse (not that this is a big change or anything). Anyhow, if you’re an affiliate or work for an affiliate network or something and want to kick it while im out there, shoot me an email. I may have a day free mixed in with work.
What’s the Cakes doin’ work in LA for? Well, some may be familiar with what’s called “white-label” affiliate programs. This term is generally used when someone starts running an offer directly with the merchant, cutting out the middle man, OR the merchant/network setting up an affiliate’s own branded site for an offer. Going direct with a merchant on an offer can generally get you higher payouts, better tracking, and less bullshit, but is not always easy to pull off, or desirable. There are downsides, but that’s another tangent.
So what if you were to go a step further? What if a company has no affiliate program and isn’t marketing their products online at all? And what if you were to convince them that they need to be doing online marketing and taking you on as their only affiliate as well as paying your airfare, and all that jazz to come set up some online ad campaigns and get a (big big) payout for leads? Well that would be above and beyond a normal white-label deal. This is also what Nickycakes will be up to for the next week.
More to come! Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
This is a guest post by Amin who was the winner of Nickycakes’ Xbox 360. It’s not about how he won the contest, since he already posted about that on his blog, however, he decided to write about how he makes bank in another, area. Def some good ideas. Thanks dude.
I wrote a post on how I came first in Nickycakes contest by running debt relief offers on Facebook, which you can read on my blog. I eventually stopped the campaign because profit margins were shrinking, so instead of making that post here I decided to write a new guest post on one of my more preferred methods of making money through PPC.
It’s worth starting off by saying that I am much more of a product peddling affiliate than one who promotes the kind of offers found on CPA networks. I make most of my money through Clickbank, which offers a HUGE number of products across various different niches you can promote. If you thought the only way to make money through Clickbank was by promoting crappy ‘get rich quick’ eBooks, the kind of stuff that Nickycakes vomits over, then your dead wrong. When it comes to Clickbank, you’ve got to be creative and not just look at the top performing ‘high gravity’ products.
Now the idea here is to produce a number of different content based ‘review’ sites promoting the same products in a small niche of your choice. You would then advertise each review website on Google through a separate Adwords account via the Adwords MCC (My Client Centre), allowing you to have all your review sites displayed for the exact same identical keyword search terms you are targeting in your campaigns.
If you target the same keywords in multiple campaigns within a single Adwords account, only the ads from one of your campaigns will be displayed at any one time to a user searching for one of your keywords. However, by creating new accounts through the Adwords’ MCC, you will be able to create a new campaign in each account and have all your ads in all your campaigns displayed for the same keyword search terms.
While I have personally not had any problems with Adwords for doing this, I’m assuming this really depends on how you go about implementing this method. If for example, your review sites all use the same content, are all under one domain through sub domains, and are blatantly there to promote one product, then don’t be surprised if Adwords comes down on you with a ban hammer.
Take note of the following if you are particularly worried about having your Adwords account banned:
- Make your content high quality – the higher the quality, the stronger the pre-sell
- Use separate domains – a no brainer, you MUST have a separate domain for each site
- Have new content written for each site – that means new reviews for the same products
- Use a new Clickbank account for each site – so you aren’t caught out by savvy competitors
- Cloak all your affiliate links – you should always do this anyway for obvious reasons
I normally outsource all of my reviews to inexpensive ghost writers. I then check over all the content written for me by my writers and I always end up making changes to the content so it actually functions like a good sales copy. For the actual sites, I use Wordpress with a free theme slapped on. There are tons of themes to choose from, and you can easily have it modified into a review style site. If you can’t modify themes on your own or don’t want to hire someone to do it for you, there are a few review style themes you can choose from as well. Google it.
Three final points worth considering:
- I use this particular strategy to promote paid products as an affiliate. I’ve always been more comfortable investing my time and money into developing content rich review sites for products which don’t have an expiry date. This allows me to optimise my sites for the search engines without worrying about the offer expiring, in addition to gaining a large share of PPC traffic which would otherwise have gone to my competitors. Having said that, there is no reason you can’t use this method to promote CPA offers via the PPC > landing page > offer approach.
- This strategy works best for smaller niches which aren’t madly saturated with competition. Dominating small niches in the sponsored links section of the Google SERPs through multiple placements is far easier and more effective than to attempt to do the same for a much larger and more competitive niche.
- Don’t start all your campaigns at once. I had one campaign running for months before I started a new campaign advertising a new site on a new Adwords account. That put aside, you want to know your first campaign is generating a solid profit before you go onto expanding, otherwise you will feel like an idiot if your three new campaigns on your three different accounts fail en masse.
The main point of this post was to make you aware of how you can put your Adwords MCC to good use. I also spend as much time and money on PPC as I do on building links to my site and developing site content for SEO purposes. There is nothing better than having your websites listed at the top of Google’s organic AND paid listings, no matter how small the niche is. In fact, the smaller the niche, the easier it is for you to dominate it.
I didn’t really get into any real depth here, mostly because I’m lazy, but hopefully you should have gained several ideas from this post.
Cheers,
Amin
Published by nickycakes //
