WhoIsAndrewWee: Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, Social Traffic

Merchants: How Does Your Cost-Per-Sale Affiliate Program Stack Up? August 19, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , add a comment

In parallel to developing my own products and promoting CPA offers, I’ve been promoting CPS (Cost-Per-Sale) offers since 2006.

I’ve been looking into doing more of such programs recently and have set up some sites which will be trafficked via SEO and social-based traffic. There will be more such sites being launched further down the pipeline.

Which the affiliate can do everything possible to bring the traffic over and pre-sell the product, it just feels that some merchants are going out of their way to sabotage their own success.

Here’s some examples:

Failing to benchmark your affiliate program: Whatever you may think, your affiliate program does not exist in isolation. Most diligent affiliates will compare affiliate programs across the variety of product providers, especially if it’s a commodity items like a beauty product, computer equipment or a musical instrument. Offering a 5% commission on the sale value when your competitors are offering a 10% or 15% payout makes you uncompetitive. There are some exceptions, where if you are the only merchant offering a particular product or your prices are low enough that the majority of buyers would buy through you, rather than another merchant.
Failing to offer appropriate affiliate tools: If you have 1,000 products in your inventory, whether books, music or movies, isn’t it silly to give a link to your root domain? Don’t you think it makes more sense to provide product-specific links, or even better, the ability to deep link to any page within your website? This gives affiliates the option to use creative marketing techniques.
Offering invalid URLs, expired coupon codes, failing to give what you’re supposed to give: If you claim to give product specific links, having that link (complete with a “productID=” field) go to the root domain is a “FAIL” in my book. Even worse is having the link go to a 404 page. What were you thinking? Same goes with giving coupon codes which have expired, exceeded the number of uses. Ditto for failing to reply to email, or if you’re away, failing to set up an “away” message or give an alternative contact.

There are probably some of the sins that’ve been irritating as I’ve been putting together campaigns. The cardinal sin that some merchants are making is failing to realize that you’ll probably never get a second chance to make a first impression once you’ve lost your affiliates for good.

If that’s the case, why’re you even offering an affiliate program?

PS: I’m documenting a couple of sites I’ve been working on at David Ford’s PPV Playbook forum. If you’re not a member yet, be sure to check out the PPV Playbook discount code too.

Popularity: 3%

Getting Away From The Bonanza Model Of Internet Marketing August 17, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , 2 comments

You’ve probably heard them, the online equivalent of fisherman’s tales.

“This one time, I had a campaign that generated 400% ROI. Yeah, I spent $50 and made $200.”

“This one offer was generating $2,300 per day. It’s about 10x higher than anything I ever had. Unfortunately it was a Christmas offer and died after 3 days.”

This is the same type of mindset you have with newbie punters who visit Vegas expecting to hit the jackpot, or the old guy who shows up at the gas station and buys $30 worth of scratch-and-win lottery tickets.

While it’s possible to strike the motherlode, whether you’re buying a ticket, signing an insertion order for a high-value media buy, or trying out a new strategy with PPV traffic, just realize that beyond just the dollar value of your return, there’s the repeatability of the offer too.

If you won a $30 million lottery, you’re probably set (for a while).

But with the broader picture, your income is a function of:

[dollar value] x [repeatability].

If you’re generating say $1,000 a day, the strategy is to keep this going every day, to hit a consistent $30,000 per month. Because someone who’s doing $10,000 per month consistently (or $120,000 annualized) is going to outearn someone who had a one-off $50,000 campaign over a month, but then has difficulty finding his or her legs for the rest of the year.

Scalability (the ability to grow your campaigns on a massive basis) and sustainability (the ability to consistently generate returns from your campaigns) might be among the easier concepts to understand, but probably among the most difficult to understand.

To grow your internet marketing or affiliate marketing efforts to the next level requires understanding of this concept.

Popularity: 4%

PPV Playbook Discount Code August 11, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 4 comments

To get a discount on the monthly subscription at PPV Playbook, click on the “more” link below to access the PPV Playbook discount code/PPV Playbook promotion code:

(more…)

Popularity: 5%

Figuring out your long-term Internet Marketing game August 10, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 2 comments

I’ve probably had this conversation multiple times over the last month: Why aren’t I more actively using PPV in my marketing campaigns now?

I think the answer is philosophical.

Really.

The type of traffic you use and marketing offers, campaigns you plan and implement are an extension of your approach to Internet Marketing and in the broader picture, business.

I favor social traffic, organic search traffic and branded/word-of-mouth traffic more because I like long-term, consistent businesses that generate similar forms of revenue.

I think PPV is very suited for CPA traffic, especially for short form leading generation. I’ve not excluded being more aggressive with PPV, especially once I have some opt-in forms with a pre-sell email sequence behind it. But for now, I’m building out those sales funnels.

It may seem strange that I’d recommend David Ford’s PPV Playbook, since the perception is that it’s all focused on PPV.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll find the media buy, ppc and usefully for me, the SEO and social media sections (with some great strategies and ideas by Stefanie Hutson).

Be sure to check it out.

And if you’d like a promo code, drop me an email. (the email is stored on my other computer…).

EDIT: Click here to get the access code.

Popularity: 5%

Merchants, you need to bring your affiliate program to the next level July 29, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 11 comments

They say that first impressions are made within seconds of meeting someone face-to-face. You take a look at them, get a sense of the vibe they’re sending out and make a snap decision whether they’re a potential friend, partner or you might just decide to write them off entirely.

It’s the same with affiliate programs.

I was looking at developing a new niche and found one with multiple spikes in search volume and transactions multiple times a year. The incumbent had a decent affiliate program though their affiliate management leave much to be desired and training resources? Forget about it.

The problem is that it’s a niche with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of items within the space. Coupled with the fact that these are items that constantly need to be replaced and the consumers have to buy their products from somewhere and it’s not hard to imagine a longterm business resulting from this.

The sad thing is that the other merchants in the space didn’t provide deep links. I was looking for product-specific links because the competition (search results) for some of these terms were in the thousands. So what do you do if the merchant only provides links to their root domain? You could move on, though there aren’t many merchants in this space.

It’d be an unwise thing to link to their root domain via an affiliate link, then expect the lead to somehow figure out that they need to type the product name into the search engine, then click on a result.

If I were one of the users, I’d want to type the product name into the search engine and find a direct link to the product and if the price was right, buy it immediately.

If merchants don’t get the affiliate picture, it’d be smarter to hire an experienced affiliate manager or have an outsourced program manager (OPM) on at least a six month engagement (ideally longer) to get things working. Else you’re just wasting your time, and more significantly, the affiliates.

PS: You might notice that I’ve not mentioned video tools or XML datafeeds, especially with a catalog that contains more than 100,000 items. If you can’t get the basics right, there’s no point trying to run before you can crawl.

Popularity: 8%

So The Old Spice Man Told Alyssa Milano… July 16, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : viral marketing , 7 comments

…Maybe you should watch it for yourself:

And here’s the backstory:

Fresh off his appearance during a tv spot during the Superbowl, former ASU 1996 Rose Bowl wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa, reprised his role as the manly Old Spice Man and has caused a coup in social media circles.

In an industry that’s been increasingly filled with social media experts whose claimed to fame has been writing books about building a huge following on Facebook or Twitter, or building buzz, or sometimes seem like the Internet marketing equivalent of a Paris Hilton “I’m famous for being famous”, the Old Spice Man has brought a breath of fresh air to the social media scene.

On Tuesday, he took questions from multiple social media channels – Twitter and Facebook – and a team compiled the questions and had numerous personalized responses posted on YouTube, which were then emailed, retweeted and circulated around the Internet.

As of now, there are 205 videos posted on the YouTube channel with more content being progressively added.

Before you jump in with a preliminary judgement that this is a case of new-fangled efficiency in aggregating multiple channels, take a moment to watch the finished product.

The Old Spice Man comes across as:

Attractive to both genders – women want to be with him, men want to be like him.
Intelligent: He’s got the chops to reply with astute answers, compared to the incessant laughing and rambling common with some lifecasters.
Funny: He doesn’t take himself too seriously and his humor is infectious.

Except for a few critics, he’s largely won over the bulk of his followers, including Digg founder Kevin Rose, actresses Alyssa Milano and Demi Moore. His biggest win could possibly be the 4chan community, a rabble-like elite community which has spawned memes like LOLCats and RickRolling.

What helped make this a winning campaign. Some of the key details:

A successful marriage of social media practitioners and a tech team
Trust from Old Spice’s parent, Proctor and Gamble, for the ad agency to have a free hand in scripting and going live with responses to queries, without the typical multiple layers of management vetting and approval
Picking the right person to play the Old Spice Man and front the campaign.

The missing ingredient in most social campaigns is an air of sincerity, playing it straight with the audience and an essential star quality and x-factor which all but a few lack.
Isaiah Mustafa possesses all the following attributes in scads.

Watch the videos and you might just get a taste of the future of social media.

Old Spice Man replies to Digg’s Kevin Rose: