WhoIsAndrewWee: Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, Social Traffic

How Affiliate Managers Should Get Their Act Together July 14, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 12 comments

Some affiliate managers might not confess to it, but when it comes to dealing with affiliates, more than half of them are noobs.

The turnover in the affiliate marketing industry is high, whether you’re talking about networks, affiliate managers or affiliate marketers.

From the affiliate side, it seems like a constant merry-go-round at some networks (particularly the struggling ones) with a new affiliate manager assigned to my accounts every 2-3 months. Maybe they’re having difficulty hitting their monthly or quarterly quotas? I don’t know, but their experience or lack of it shows especially when new affiliate managers inherit the accounts for the AM who left.

Here’s a typical bone-headed intro email.

“Hi, how are you doing? I’m your new affiliate manager/strategist/consultant/partner. What type of offers do you promote? What traffic types do you use? How long have you been in the industry?”

These are danger signs, especially if you’re getting these emails.

Firstly, unless the affiliate is operating under the radar/underground, or one of those super-secretive Israeli affiliates operating with mossad-like secrecy, it’s not too difficult to find their footprints, whether on an affiliate forum like WickedFire or ABestWeb. From their postings you should be able to tell whether they’re noobs or experienced affiliates. You should be able to check out their posts to look at the types of questions they’re asking to get a gauge of their experience level and possibly traffic promotion strategies too.

Many will also have an online presence, whether it’s listed on AffBuzz, else you should be able to find their WordPress blog, Twitter or Facebook account. Failing which, you could talk to your regular group of affiliates to see if they know who the “new guy” or girl is. I know it’s probably easier to send a mass email (personalizing the recipient name), but that’s as good as throwing your list of prospects at the wall and hoping that something sticks.

I’m not going to say that going through a list of 200-300 affiliates that you’ve been handed is easy, especially since the bulk of them might be inactive. But if you’re going to make this more than just a 2-3 month gig, getting by on your $2,000/month base salary, then you need to do a little investment. In this case, it’s not even any cash out of your own pocket (although the better AMs do invest in researching their affiliates), just a little time and company time at that.

It’s time to break out your Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet and do a little affiliate human resources management. Based on your preliminary research, give each affiliate a rating. I like to give them either a A/B/C grade or 1/2/3. Your choice.

You need at least 50 prospects in the A/B basket to make any decent overriding off their efforts, since you might only get 10% of them active.

Once you’ve got your 50 producers, in your next column is where you list some the background information, such as where they’re based, what type of traffic promotion they use, what types of offers they like.

It’s always weird for me that so few affiliate managers are willing to invest something like $67 bucks a month to sign up for a membership at sites like David Ford’s PPV Playbook. You have new and experienced affiliates who’re learning marketing techniques, applying them and building their affiliate income to $100/day and in some cases much more than that.

Then you only have 1-2 network owners who’re active in there and I believe there’ve been less than 3 affiliate managers, including EWA’s Ryan Eagle and GetAds’ Josh Todd, that I’ve seen on there.

So let’s take a stock-take:

Hundreds of active affiliates on a paid forum, which prequalifies them as high value leads
Experienced marketers like David Ford, Mr Green and other less high profile affiliates doing walkthroughs of campaigns, including keywords, URL targets, offers. Basically everything
Few affiliate managers to recruit these affiliates

If you are an affiliate manager or network owner, is this short-sightedness not to invest $67/month to pick up a few good producers?

The slogan “It takes money to make money” applies here.

If you’re an affiliate, you’ll pick up a thing or two at PPV Playbook too.

Popularity: 10%

Should Marketers Fear Competition? July 6, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , 6 comments

Your “inner game” or mental outlook has a great deal to how you run your business.

In a recent conversation with another marketer I mentioned that a specific home improvement niche might be worth developing, he mentioned that there’re a number of incumbent sites in the space and it might not be worth developing.

There’re bound to be free high authority sites with great content in any lucrative niche. They do have to monetize, even if it’s via adsense, yahoo publisher or some other form of advertising, if they’re planning to be in the business longterm.

On the other hand, you could take a rock and hit some other marketer who’s in the same niche and charging a premium for content – video, PDF reports, audio walkthroughs.

What’s the difference between something that’s free and another that’s paid? Should you fear competition?

My stock response is that free stuff tends to be limited. Unless someone is paying you, the site tends to be one-sided. The site owner publishes content based on keyword demand and search volume and works on 1-2% of traffic clicking on ads or picking broad enough keywords to bring a nice ROI on their CPM-based advertiser payouts.

Paid sites tend to be more customer-focused, just because it’s performance marketing-oriented. If they don’t like the affiliate program you’re promoting or the ebook or guide you’re created and are selling, you’ll come away with empty pockets at the end of the day.

If capitalism teaches anything, it’s that markets are self-correcting. Or in simple English, if your product sucks, you will get zero sales.

So the first thing you need to figure out is your concept. If it isn’t sound, you’re going to have an uphill battle making much headway in your niche, let alone making any decent coin.

The second element is probably the more important one. While a solid business model and concept are good, I’d say that marketing is even more important. You could have the world’s best product and yet fail. Two examples: Creative Technology (based out of Singapore) was the first out the gates with sound cards (remember those?) especially it’s “SoundBlaster” series of cards. It was also one of the earliest with MP3 players (at least a couple of years before the first iPod was released into the market). Given its expertise in audio technology, you’d think that it’d have stitched up the market. But no, instead it decided to come up with it’s own kookie/weird advertising and promptly lost the war once the iPod came onto the scene.

Here’s a video about branding and marketing for the iPhone (note: coarse language)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

Like I said: branding/marketing > market concept.

Popularity: 11%

CPA Affiliates going into ebook guru promos? June 30, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 30 comments

One trend that’s been bubbling to the surface in recent weeks has been seeing a number of affiliate bloggers (typically practising or at one time practising CPA affiliates) branch into the list building/ebook promotion game.

I’m not sure that this is exactly a good thing.

But first, let’s look at when it might be a good thing.

If your business was heavily dependent on rebills and some of your favorite offers got nuked due to the change in Wells Fargo bank and other payment processors cancelling merchant accounts for some of these rebill offer owners, you’re left with either promoting short form lead gen offers at about 5-10% of the payout of your rebill offers or branching into other areas of internet marketing like domain development/site flipping through flippa, pay-per-sale affiliate programs, promoting/dropshipping physical products or joining the ebook promotion game. Nothing wrong with any of these options.

But here’s the rub. With ebook promos, it can be a guru clusterfrack, especially when everyone is promoting the same offer. That’s already what happens in the information marketing world, especially in the make money online niche. Everyone and his half-sister and dog is suddenly promotion Jeff Johnson’s Product Launch Formula 3.0 making it sounds like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. If so, what’re you going to do when the next product comes along? Again, proclaim that it’s the “bestest” thing you’re ever seen?

What some bloggers or wannabee experts don’t realize is that you have a social goodwill bank to draw upon. Each time you “sell out”, you withdraw some goodwill out of that bank. If you go overboard, you’re not going to have anything to draw upon and will probably lose the respect of your peers and others in the industry.

If you do choose to go down this path, choose wisely because it’s pretty difficult to turn back.

Popularity: 14%

Save $50 Or More On Amazon.com Purchases June 22, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , 5 comments

Although other websites might have some items which are a couple of bucks cheaper than on Amazon, I still order most of my stuff from there because I can get almost everything at one place – books, DVDs, software, electronics and computer stuff.

I’m a “burst shopper” because I’m overseas. So when I come visit the US, I tend to buy a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff each time and send it to my hotel or conference location.

I just saved about $60 on an order placed just this weekend. It was really easy since Amazon has just changed some of their terms and conditions. Want to know how?

Click the “More” link below to find out:

(more…)

Popularity: 13%

Internet Marketing Cookbook 2 launch promo ends Wednesday, midnight EST June 16, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , 1 comment so far

If you’re not sure what the title’s refering to, be sure to read the Internet Marketing Cookbook launch promo post.

What’s happened in the past week since the launch, I’ve kicked off a pay-per-sale case study for the Mail Order Shoppe and will be revving the campaign into high gear till mid-July before shifting into another case study. Whether you’re a new or advanced marketer, you should get some tips from this to incorporate into your own campaigns.

Promo ends Wednesday, Midnight EST (which will be noon Thursday in my part of the world).

See you on the other side.

PS: The promo code is available at the IMC 2 launch post.

Popularity: 13%

How not to suck at video marketing

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , 2 comments

I’ve been looking at different ways to promote the pay-per-sale merchant, Mail Order Shoppe, the main case study on Internet Marketing Cookbook (which will run from now till mid July)and it’s been amusing and sometimes funny to see how merchants and affiliates can get their video marketing strategy messed up.

First the good news:

YouTube has replaced Google as a search engine for a number of demographics, especially tweens, teens, young adults.
The user interface means that everyone has an equal opportunity to put video up and generate leads for affiliate offers or your own products.
Hosted video streaming services mean you don’t need a VPS or dedicated server or content delivery network. It’s literally upload and go.

Now the bad news:

Just because you have the ability to upload 10 minutes videos doesn’t mean you should. I’m doing editorial consulting work now, and just because a writer has written 1,000 words, doesn’t mean they’ll get published. In some cases I’ve cut it down to 300 words or less (ie: deleted 70% of the content). You have to give content the space it deserves. More is (frequently) not always better. 1-2 minutes is the sweet spot if you want impactful video that converts.
Making a video that showcases your company or your product. Beep, wrong answer. Consumers search for answers to questions or problems they have. That doesn’t mean they want to watch a 5-minute video. What they want is a relevant, neutral, informative (being entertaining doesn’t hurt) video that helps them fix a problem now. Look at the “Does it blend?” videos. Be entertained as iphones, ipaqs get shredded, then go out and order your own Blendtec juicer.
Lacking a call to action: Institutional advertising is where big brands spend big bucks creating “branding”/mindshare. There’s no regard for ROI, in many cases there’s no clear call to action, aside from viewership or Nielsen ratings (which don’t have ROI or revenue related metrics built in). This is about as useful as a bazooka to someone trying to make an omelette.

So if you’re going to do video, consider:

Length: follow the “mini skirt” rule. Long enough to cover the essentials, short enough to keep things interesting.
On-point, on-target: Focus on the core of the problem and provide a solution. Save your lifestory for someone who cares.
Call to action, stats/analytics: If you’re not implementing some form of conversion tracking in your video marketing (using a special URL, dedicated domain), then you might as well be doing ppc/ppv without any conversion tracking too. Good luck with that.

Video can be powerful, effective and highly profitable.

Just don’t join the 99% of marketers who try it and suck at it.

Popularity: 12%