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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 //
Last November, Myspace announced that it would be releasing a self-serve ad platform in early 2008. The ad platform would resemble Facebook’s current self serve social ad system. Early news indicated that the platform would only allow for promotion of a user’s myspace page, however, things can change quite a bit.
Next week Myspace will be launching their long awaited (yawn…zzzzz) Developer Platform, which Nickycakes can only assume is supposed to be their version of Facebook Applications. As everyone knows, facebook applications pretty much ruined facebook’s clean functionality, but it’s hard to imagine a crappy site like myspace getting any worse, so maybe it will bring on some sort of improvement.
The dev platform was announced in October, and the self serve ad platform was announced in early November. So one can only hope that the ad platform will be right on the heels of next week’s release.
Get your curl scripts ready boys. It may be party time once again.
Published by nickycakes //
Almost exactly one year ago, Eli from BluehatSEO made a post on MadLib sites. The basic idea behind a MadLib site is this: You make a script that will randomly (or not so randomly) generate pages from a database of information by inserting different pieces of information into each post to make them unique. For example: Today I saw *girlsname* go into *storename* and buy *productname*. You can generate thousands and thousands of unique pages this way with very little effort and get indexed by google without duplicate content penalty if you do a decent job.
Well, the problem is, not everyone has the ability to code their own madlib system, and not everyone owns large databases to use for the process. That’s where Datapresser comes in.
About 6 months ago, Rob at Seocracy started working on Datapresser. It’s a comprehensive madlib blog generating package. All you have to do is enter your madlib text and title using their formatting system using their huge databases of information, and it will generate thousands of unique content pages, in wordpress format, for you to slap on your wordpress blog and let ‘er go.
Saturday morning, Rob launched Datapresser.com with a fee of a modest $45 a month and 60 available signups. The 60 signups were gone in under 30 minutes. $2700 in 30 minutes ain’t bad, to be honest. If you weren’t able to get an account on Saturday, don’t worry. Rob is working on getting more server’s up to be able to handle more users, so there will still be opportunity to get your spot.
Anyway, Nickycakes is extremely grateful to have been given an account to check out Datapresser and see what it’s all about. At first blush, it’s great. The interface is clean, which the Cakes loves. The help file is…..well…helpful. And it works damn quick. There are 3 output formats for the data, including 2 for wordpress, and one is text output for use with pretty much anything.
If you don’t understand the scope of a tool like this, think about it a little harder. With Datapresser, or any madlib script, you can automatically generate thousands of unique articles for ANY niche you can think of. Go to your favorite affiliate network, open up the offers, and pick one. Want to make a site with thousands of keyword content rich pages related to that offer? Want to do it in under an hour? No prob!
So anyway, if you’re interested, keep checking seocracy and datapresser for updates on when the next batch of signups will be available.
And thanks again Rob. Great tool.
Published by nickycakes //
This may seem elementary to a few, but many times Nickycakes writes posts because it’s something he needs a refresher on as well. Not to mention there was no Moron Monday post this week due to unforeseen circumstances, so this will have to do.
If you run a blog or other site, you NEED to find a way to add new content daily if you want to be successful. Either by posting manually, autoposting, adding an aggregated RSS feed, whatever, your page needs to change daily. There are many reasons why this will help you. Here are just a few:
First, and one of the most important, is crawl rate. Google sends it’s bots to look at your page at regularly scheduled intervals. These intervals are different for each page. You can view how often your site is being crawled by signing up for google webmaster tools. When G first indexes your site, the crawl rate will be rather slow, maybe once a week or something, maybe slower. When it returns and finds new content, it will increase the crawl rate and come back sooner the next time. If there is no new content, it will decrease the rate, and wait a little longer before checking back with you. Some sites, like Digg are indexed almost constantly by google because the content is constantly changing, whereas static sites may only be checked every month or so, maybe longer. There has been quite a bit of recent speculation that newer content is given a lot of favor in google search rankings, so it’s really important to have your crawl rate high to take full advantage.
Next, indexing. This follows along with crawl rate, and seems fairly obvious. If your site is getting crawled more often by google, then your site will be fully indexed faster. For large database sites, this is key as you are likely relying on mass pages getting indexed to reach your goals.
Another important reason to update your site daily is for unique content and longtail keywords. If you’re manually updating your site with blog posts, this will hit home for you after a while. Sometimes you will write a post that you don’t think is that great, and after a week you’ll see tons of traffic pouring into your site from some keyword combination you posted that you weren’t even expecting to rank for. But even if you aren’t manually updating your site, and using rss feed aggregation or another automatic content generation method, the more new content sources you have going into your site, the less likely you are to be penalized by google for using copied content.
Finally, and most importantly (for blogs anyway) is return users and subscriptions. When a reader finds a new site, they will check it two times. The first time they check it will be when they find it in a search engine result, or recommended by a friend, or forum, or link, or whatever. The second time they come back, will be to see if there’s anything new. If there isn’t, they most likely won’t be returning again. If there IS new content, they’ll probably add it to their RSS feed reader, or bookmarks and come back often (assuming you’re not running a site full of retarded useless information).
A note about RSS Subscribers:
Nickycakes may make an entire post about this, but it’s been beaten to death already by others. RSS Subscribers are so key in running a successful blog. If you have 1000 subscribers, you know that when you post something new, you’re going to be getting a good number of those hits automatically coming to your site. Make absolutely sure it’s easy for people to subscribe to your feed.
Published by nickycakes //
When you visit a website, several pieces of information are usually recorded by that site. Your IP, Browser, and Referer address are a few of them. The Referer address is the address of the page you just came from. Most webmasters, from time to time, check their Referer log to see where their traffic is coming from. When they see traffic coming from a website they haven’t heard of, they go to check it out to see why this website linked to them.Using this to your advantage to build a little extra traffic for your site is easy. If you use Firefox (and you should, because IE is for morons), you can go grab a plugin called RefControl. Refcontrol allows you to overwrite the referer url that your browser normally sends to webpages with whatever you want. So just put in your site address and browse the web normally. Keep in mind that this will, in some cases, annoy the crap out of people, but if you know anything about Nickycakes, annoying the crap out of people is a benefit and not a drawback.
If you were so inclined, you could also write a curl script to go to random pages all day spamming your referer url all over the place. This will actually serve 2 purposes. First, as already mentioned, webmasters will check you out to see why you’re linking to them. Second, some statistics packages keep a public log of traffic, indexed by google. By spamming your referer all over the place, you will end up on some of these lists and generate backlinks for yourself. This is sometimes referred to as “Referer Bombing”.
And for the ultimate Rickroll, use http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com as your referer at all times.
Published by nickycakes //
