Death of an Affiliate

Transcription

1

2 Death of an Affiliate Affiliate marketing is sexy. By Gobala LinkTrackr.com Promoting someone else s products online, anonymously, no face-to-face communication, no high pressure sales methods, and still earning a huge commission is mind-blowing to most people. Other great benefits-- you don t have to worry about customer support, replying to s, or delivery of the product. In addition, you re free to make money promoting any type of product in any niche market. Yes, affiliate marketing is awesome However, in the heat of the excitement, caught up in the hype, most new affiliates commit some grave mistakes that will come back to haunt them time and again. This report reveals the deadliest affiliate marketing sins that all affiliates commit at one point or another. You may be committing some, or all of them, without even realizing it. If you re not committing any of them, to any extent, you re lying :) This is not a report that tells you what to do. It tells you what NOT to do, and explains why. Death of an Affiliate "2

3 Sin #1: Promoting Too Many Products Our instincts tell us that the more products we promote, the more money we ll make. It s common sense, right? Well actually, you couldn t be more wrong. Promoting too many affiliate products at a time will result in you making less money, not more. Here s why: Only a handful of affiliate products really sell. The rest are just a waste of your time. Let s say you decide to start a blog about losing weight, and you want to monetize your traffic by promoting a digital product from ClickBank. A quick look at the ClickBank marketplace ( from just the Health and Fitness category reveals numerous options to choose from: Here s the problem: Do you know how to determine which products are profitable? To try and promote all of them is a big waste of time; especially when ClickBank already tells you which products perform the best. They actually tell you which ones you should promote, if you know what to look for. There are two important numbers you should focus on, which are: Death of an Affiliate "3

4 Total $/sale This tells you the average commission per sale, which is how much you earn when you make a sale of the product. This includes the initial commission and recurring commissions, if any. Grav Gravity tells you the number of unique affiliates who earned a commission by promoting a particular product over the past 12 weeks. This tells you that a lot of affiliates make money by promoting it, and you probably will too. Products with a Gravity of more than 100 are guaranteed to sell. You can ignore the rest when you re just getting started with affiliate marketing. The average commission per sale (Avg. $/sale) for products can be misleading and should not be a factor in choosing products to promote. Here s why: Just because a product pays you 75% commission doesn t mean that you re going to make more money from it. If the product does not sell, 75% of zero is still zero. At the end of the day, it s how much commission you actually earn, not the commission percentage that matters. As you can see, it s easy for you to tell which ClickBank products to promote. The same goes for Commission Junction ( Browsing through the Financial Services category you can see the total Network Earnings for individual products: " Death of an Affiliate "4

5 Commission Junction doesn t publish the exact formula, but generally speaking the more green bars a product has, the higher the number of affiliates who have made money promoting it. Again, this tells you which products you should focus on. Seems easy, doesn t it? Here s the catch: Since these stats are readily available, chances are high that everyone else is promoting the same products. In other words, you re competing with thousands of other affiliates who are also looking to promote only the best known products. You ll have a tougher time getting SEO traffic, or buying PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. The way out of this is to find an affiliate program that is not part of any network. This is what we call a standalone affiliate program - where the affiliate tracking system, marketing resources and payouts are handled directly by the product owner. In this case, there will not be much in the way of stats published by the product owner. You have no reference to the profitability of the products and must find out for yourself. This is when you need to track your affiliate promotions and come up with your own stats. This is what separates the Super Affiliates from the newbies. Here s why: Discovering profitable affiliate programs that aren t part of affiliate networks is tough, especially if you don t have the right tools to do it. However, the payoff can be incredible it can even make you rich. If you re just getting started, you need the right tools for the job. If you don t have them, just stick to the same programs that everyone else is promoting. You won t get rich, but you will make your first commission for sure Sin #2: Falling in Love with the Product Every once in a while, you come across a product that is exactly what you ve been looking for all this time. It is high-quality, works great, has a thousand features, and does everything you want it to do. This is when most affiliates go into evangelist mode. They fall in love with the product. They get emotional about the product, which in most cases they have used and are extremely satisfied. They are convinced that this product is heaven-sent and everyone should buy it. Death of an Affiliate "5

6 They then set out on a crusade to convince everyone else to buy it. They create product reviews, video tutorials, landing pages, and optimized ad campaigns to sell the product. Nevertheless, after weeks, they still haven t sold a single copy. But, that doesn t deter them. Instead, they keep thinking that maybe it s their fault. I can improve my copywriting. I can find more targeted buyers... they keep telling themselves. When you fall in love with a product, you re irrational. You forget to look at the numbers, even though they are staring you in the face. You get frustrated. The truth is, not all great products sell well. A product may be the best in the market, but if the product owner does a poor job at marketing it, it will not sell. Ask yourself: Are you promoting affiliate products right now that haven t made you any money in the past three months? If you are, it s time to get real. Sin #3: Not Doing More of What Works If something works, do more of it. I know, again it sounds like plain old common sense, right? However, here s the truth: Most affiliates do the exact opposite. They do more of what is not proven to work, instead of doing more of what already works for them. Consider this scenario... You sign up for an affiliate program, and immediately set out to promote it. You talk about it on FaceBook. You Tweet your affiliate link to your followers. You write a product review on your blog. You submit an article to free article sites. After an exhausting day, you login to your affiliate account to find that you ve made one sale. Yahoo You re excited and pumped up to do more the next day. However, here s the question: Where did that sale come from? Did it come from FaceBook, or Twitter? Did it come from your blog, or from the free article you submitted? Unless you can answer this question, it s better for you not to do anything at all. You will most probably end up doing more of what didn t work, instead of what made that one sale. Death of an Affiliate "6

7 The secret of all Super Affiliates is that they know exactly where their sales come from. They have sophisticated in-house tracking systems and make extensive use of campaigns, sub campaigns, Google Analytics and other types of tracking software. They are able to pinpoint the source of a sale, which allows them to divert their money and energy to that source, thus allowing them to triple their affiliate commissions without any additional effort or money. Sin #4: Putting All Your Eggs in Google s Basket Google is the largest source of web traffic on the planet, or at least it used to be (I ll get to that in a while), and there s no denying that you can make a lot of money in affiliate marketing from both the free and paid traffic from Google. Most new affiliates tend to spend way too much time, and place way too much trust in Google, especially in Google s AdWords ( PPC program. When it was first launched in 2002, Google AdWords was a godsend. It was easy to sign up for AdWords and create your first affiliate ad. In less than 15 minutes, your ads could be seen by anyone, anywhere in the world when they did a highly targeted search in Google. Instantly, you could send targeted traffic to the merchant and make a decent commission. Since almost all except the highly competitive keywords in Google AdWords cost you a minimum of $0.05 a click, you could easily make a profit. In addition, as long as you had some copywriting skills and the right know-how, you can easily pay much less by optimizing your ads to generate higher CTRs. Simply put, any fool could have made money from affiliate marketing in 2002, thanks to Google Adwords. However, things started to change rapidly since AdWords became mainstream, and Google went public. That attracted even more Fortune 500 companies, and thousands of ad agencies, to Google AdWords. Once these big companies got on board, they were calling the shots. It was about that same time that Google got arrogant. They forgot all about the little people who helped them build Adwords into what it is today. They started focusing only on the big dogs. Adwords became more complex, and the price of keyword bids skyrocketed. Google changed their terms of service, tweaked their algorithm, and introduced more barriers to entry for the average Joe like you and me. Death of an Affiliate "7

8 Even if you do manage to follow everything Google says to the teeth, how would they reward you? They probably rewarded you by: 1. Giving you a Google slap (like in 2008) or 2. Banning your account for life with no warning whatsoever. In 2009, I was shocked and suspicious when I received an from the Google Adwords Team informing me that my account had been banned for life. " They didn t bother to explain exactly why, and there was no opportunity to ask questions or give feedback. My account was active for over 5 years, and I never had any problems with it. No warnings, no temporary bans, nothing. s to their support received the same canned messages repeatedly. Then, I realized I was not alone. Death of an Affiliate "8

9 " A quick search online revealed that a lot of other affiliate marketers had received the boot from Google, with no warning whatsoever. Additionally,, just like me, they were banned for life. Here are some online posts related to Google bans, including some very well-known affiliates and marketers: Source: Death of an Affiliate "9

10 " Source: Source: Death of an Affiliate "10

11 Source: You may assume that since you re paying Google money to use their advertising platform, you re their partner in some way. In fact, you would expect at least some sort of professionalism and courtesy. You re wrong. Here s the fact: Affiliate marketers are low life scum in Google s world. They will terminate you whenever they want to, and you cannot do a thing about it. Google Adwords is now too expensive for most affiliate marketers anyway. The cost per click for almost any profitable search term (keyword) is too expensive, and Google has made Adwords way too complicated for the average Joe. In fact, most new affiliate marketers fail because of Google Adwords. They either got duped into believing that Adwords will make them rich overnight (which was possible in 2002 right up to late 2005) and spend their hard earned savings buying a thousand clicks in a single day. Google Adwords is dead, at least for the average affiliate like you and me. If you put all your eggs in Google s basket, you have no Plan B. When they kick you out, you have nothing le2. Death of an Affiliate "11

12 " Sin #5: Not Leveraging on Free Social Traffic If you ve had bad experiences with Google AdWords and SEO, it s easy to think that you re doomed. After all, those are the two most common affiliate marketing methods taught in ebooks and seminars. The solution: FaceBook, Twitter and other social media sites. FaceBook itself is now larger than Google (unique visitors). With so much traffic on the table, you simply cannot ignore social media. However, there s a lot of misinformation about social media marketing. The gurus seem to tell you that you need a huge Twitter follower list, or a huge FaceBook friend base. In truth, you need neither. It will take you months to build a huge Twitter follower list, and months to add thousands of friends in FaceBook. You don t need to do the hard work yourself, especially if others have already done it for you What am I talking about? I am talking about leverage: Use other people s followers and friends to your advantage There s nothing unethical about using leverage. In fact, think of it as word of mouth marketing using the Internet. You don t need a million friends personally to have word-of-mouth marketing for your business. All you need is a couple of friends, who have a couple of friends, who in turn also have a couple of friends. However, how do you capture the power of word-of-mouth marketing on the Internet? Ask yourself: How many times have you seen this in the past week: Or this: Death of an Affiliate "12

13 " Or even this: It seems like everyone wants to share everything nowadays, doesn't it? People share photos, events, applications and even those annoying games on FaceBook. However, most importantly, they share websites Here's a powerful thought: What if you could get them to share your affiliate link instead? Look at the picture below, from one of my own sites. FaceBook users have shared this single article 305 times. That means that a link to my site has been posted on 305 different profile pages on FaceBook. 305 shares do not equal 305 visitors or clicks to your site, because anything you share on Face- Book can be viewed by all your friends. What if a single person who shared that post had 200 friends in his profile and only 1% clicked on his shared link? 305 shares X 200 friends x 1% clicked = 610 clicks Of course, the average active FaceBook user has way more than 200 friends. In fact, most of my friends each have between friends on FaceBook. Assuming your friends have an average of 500 friends each, and 1% of their friends click on your affiliate link, you get: 305 shares X 500 friends x 1% clicked = 1525 clicks Question: How much money would you have spent with a typical Google Adwords campaign, assuming you paid $0.50 per click? Answer: A shocking $626 of your hard earned cash Here s the truth: People want to share good websites they discover on the Internet. They have a place to share - FaceBook and Twitter - and they do so willingly. In fact, most Internet users are so addicted to sharing by now, that's its almost impossible to stop them from doing so. Death of an Affiliate "13

14 Additionally, just like word-of-mouth advertising, your potential customers hear about your product or service from their friends someone they trust to some extent and are more open about buying. You simply cannot get that kind of warm, engaged traffic from advertising on Google or anywhere else for that matter Our LinkTrackr software makes it easy for affiliate marketers to leverage the power of personal recommendation and social media to get free, targeted traffic directly to their affiliate links, using our unique Viral Bar technology. Here s what our Viral Bar looks like: 1. LinkTrackr completely cloaks your affiliate links with a pretty link Instead of something like which clearly shows it s an affiliate link, you can use an easier to remember and prettier link like Your actual affiliate link is hidden in the browser. This prevents affiliate link theft, and makes your links more professional. In fact, you can use your own domain name to control your branding, for example 2. LinkTrackr allows people to share your cloaked affiliate link via social media. Our viral bar adds the most common (and popular) sharing tools like the Twitter Retweet, FaceBook Like & FaceBook Share, Google+, StumbleUpon and others. Whenever someone shares your cloaked page, they are in fact sharing your cloaked affiliate link. Anyone in his or her friend network or follower list who clicks on the shared link is actually clicking on your affiliate link. Death of an Affiliate "14

15 When any one of them buys the product, you get the commission, not the person who shared your link. It s mind-boggling, isn t it? With almost no effort on your part, you can create a viral affiliate marketing system and leverage existing social media networks to drive unlimited, free traffic to your affiliate sites. So forget about paying money to arrogant Google Almighty. Forget about building blogs and working on it like a dog for months hoping to get a top 10 ranking on Google. Forget about hard work. There s always an easier, smarter way to make affiliate marketing work. Sin #6: Wasting Money on Non-Profitable Ads This is so common, that even the super affiliates admit to doing it from time to time. The list of time wasting activities are too huge to list out here, but let s address the most common - meddling with scripts and free software that don t work, or are just plain redundant. For some reason, new affiliate marketers seem to think that brand new affiliate marketing software capable of doing complex stuff will help them make more money online. It won t. Every time you install new software, there s a learning curve involved. You need to understand how to install it, and how to make it work. Moreover, you probably also have to keep updating the software. Every time you install an updated version, something will break. Then you ll have to spend even more time trying to figure out what went wrong, and how to fix it. All this derails you from what you should really be doing getting more traffic to your affiliate links and making more sales. You don t need complicated software, but you do need at least one effective affiliate marketing software. During my eight years experience promoting products and services as an affiliate, I have made many of the mistakes above time and time I ve tried many different affiliate marketing software products, but all of them were either too difficult to use, or didn t do what they were supposed to do. That s why I decided to take things into my own hands, and build an effective affiliate marketing solution from the ground up. Our LinkTrackr ( solution is poised to become one of the top ad tracking and affiliate marketing systems. It s so easy to use you ll never need to read the user guide. Death of an Affiliate "15

16 Here s how LinkTrackr can help your affiliate marketing efforts. 1. Cloak, Manage and Track Affiliate Links - LinkTrackr helps you manage all your affiliate links in one place. You can easily see how many clicks you get each day for your affiliate links, and even create on-the-fly sub campaigns to track all your advertising campaigns. 2. Free Viral Traffic from FaceBook and Twitter - Leverage on the need to share using social sites like FaceBook and Twitter. Let your friends share you affiliate links to their friends, and to the friend of their friends, all without any extra effort on your part. 3. Track Sales & Leads on Your Own Website - By placing a simple pixel code on your website right after someone makes a payment or submits an option form, you can start tracking conversions. This powerful feature even lets you see how much revenue you ve made from a sale, and match that to the traffic source or ad campaign so you can easily calculate your ROI (Return on Investment). 4. Track Commissions from Affiliate Networks - You can use the same pixel code on affiliate networks that support this feature. Now, you can also see how much commissions you ve made from all your affiliate networks in on central dashboard. 5. Integrates Easily with WordPress Blogs - Automatically convert keywords on your blog into your affiliate links, and double your affiliate commissions with almost no extra effort. You can use the same LinkTrackr account with an unlimited number of blogs. 6. Easy To Use, Hassle-Free Software - LinkTrackr is 100% web-based, which means that there are no scripts to install and no tedious upgrades to deal with. All you need to do is to login to your web interface. Since all updates and improvements are automatically served to your account, you will always be using the latest and greatest version of LinkTrackr. Here s how my LinkTrackr dashboard looks: Death of an Affiliate "16

17 At a glance, you can see your top affiliate links, and know exactly where all your traffic is coming from. Basically, as soon as you login to your LinkTrackr account, you can feel the heartbeat of your entire online marketing business and see what needs to be fixed. Death of an Affiliate "17

18 LinkTrackr allows you to track sales and leads that are triggered on your own website, as well as affiliate sales you make from places like ClickBank, CommissionJunction, JVZoo or ClickSure. Therefore, you can instantly see how many sales and leads you ve made in the last 7 days without having to login to individual platforms. This saves you a lot of time, and instead of having to make sense of different data and repots from all those platforms, you have a unified dashboard with consistent reports for everything you re promoting Death of an Affiliate "18

19 One of the most powerful features in LinkTrackr is our geographical reports. We can show you all the important data filtered for individual countries: Total visitors in a given timeframe Total conversions (sales, leads) Total sales or revenue Conversion Ratio (quality of visitors) Death of an Affiliate "19

20 In LinkTrackr, we also have a campaigns feature that you can use to accurately track different ads. For example, you may be promoting an affiliate product from multiple traffic sources - PPC, Face- Book, banner ads, marketing etc. By using the campaign tracking feature extensively in all your ad campaigns, you can clearly see which ads are making money. Then, you can stop the ads that are not making money and double down on the ones that do. Net result: You make even more money Death of an Affiliate "20

21 If that wasn t enough, LinkTrackr also shows you the referring URLs and websites. You can see where your clicks are coming from, and how well each website or source converts to sales and leads. By using this information, you can double down on your marketing activities on those sites. If the referrer is a blog, try getting a paid review from the owed of the blog, or buy ads on the blog. If the referrer is a forum, then you should start participating in the forum s discussions. Net result: You reach your perfect audience. Death of an Affiliate "21

22 The screenshot above is from LinkTrackr s home page. We neatly display your top performing links and campaigns with screenshots of the website. You can choose which sites you want to appear here, and nicely curate your affiliate links like a brochure. The next time someone asks you to recommend them some good products, you can just send them to your LinkTrackr home page With LinkTrackr, you can put all your time and energy into productive tasks like generating traffic, finding better affiliate products to promote, and making more affiliate commissions Click Here to Try LinkTrackr Risk-Free for 30 Days Death of an Affiliate "22

23 Use the link above to get yourself a LinkTrackr account. Or you can visit this link manually: You can use all the awesome features in LinkTrackr, and get your money back within 30 days if you re not 100% satisfied. Read our testimonials, and you ll see why so many Internet marketers and super affiliates are turning to LinkTrackr in order to make more money online Death of an Affiliate "23

24 Wait.. What happened to Sin# 7? Death of an Affiliate "24

25 Ok, here it is Sin #7 Not Taking Action I m not going to make a big deal out of this sin, because it s the hardest to swallow, and not something that you want to hear. At the right time, you need to do the right thing. You need to take action. Not doing so is a bigger mistake than all the previous six sins combined. Think about this: What happens when you know exactly what you re doing wrong, and yet you do nothing to correct it? You get nowhere. You achieve nothing. If you want to get your affiliate marketing back on track with the right tools for the job, I strongly recommend that you check out what LinkTrackr has to offer. You can signup and start using our software in under 5 minutes, and there are no huge upfront fees to deal with. You can cancel anytime, You can make it work with your WordPress blogs. We ll be constantly improving and upgrading LinkTrackr based on your needs. It s the right thing to do. So do it. Create your account here: Wishing you all the best in your affiliate marketing efforts Death of an Affiliate "25