www.mypandamonium.com Affiliate Marketing: What, Where and When? Presented by Dorian Karthauser at the DFW Wordpress Midcities Group, Oct 2012.
Using affiliate marketing to monetize websites.
Ride the Storm: Navigating Through Unstable Periods / Katerina Rudko (Belka G...
About Affiliate Marketing by Dorian Karthauser, My Pandamonium Marketing-SEO
1. Affiliate Marketing
What, Where and When
Presented at DFW Wordpress Midcities Group
by Dorian Karthauser, My Pandamonium Marketing-SEO
Internet Marketing, Wordpress Web Design, SEO, Social Media, Consulting
Training: Wordpress, SEO, Social Media, Internet Marketing
www.mypandamonium.com
2. Affiliate Marketing
Google: Holiday Consumer Intentions 2012
http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/insights/library/studies/holiday-consumer-intentions-2012/
1. Capture Consumer Demand: 54% of consumers will start holiday shopping before
Black Friday
2. Make Sure Your Brand is Top of Mind: 46% of consumers plan to spend more time
shopping around for gifts this year because of the economy
3. Open Attribution Window: While consumers are researching early, 31% plan to do
the majority of their holiday shopping in early/mid December
4. Capture undecided holiday shoppers with search: 37% of consumers say search is
their go-to source for gift ideas, and 51% plan to research online but buy in-store
5. Implement full coverage for mobile and tablet: 4 in 5 mobile/tablet owners will use
their device for holiday shopping, and mobile users continue searching after Christmas
3. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in
which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor
or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing
efforts.
The industry has four core players:
1. Merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'),
2. Network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from
and also takes care of the payments),
3. Publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and
4. Customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a
secondary tier of players, including affiliate management
agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
4. Affiliate Marketing
• Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some
degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods
include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine
marketing (PPC - Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, and in some sense display
advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques,
such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
• Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with Referral Marketing, as both forms
of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are
distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate
marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral
marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales.
• Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines,
e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers,
affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a
significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
From Wikipeida, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
6. Affiliate Marketing
Successful affiliate programs require significant
work and maintenance. Having a successful
affiliate program is more difficult in 2012.
With the exception of some vertical markets, it
is rare for an affiliate program to generate
considerable revenue with poor management or
no management ("auto-drive").
7. Affiliate Marketing
Where to use Affiliate Marketing?
• Blogs
• Websites
• Social Media
https://www.facebook.com/AmazonItems (Facebook Affiliate Marketing App for Amazon)
8. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing Presentation
• Comparison shopping websites and directories
• Coupon and rebate websites
• Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
• Personal websites
• Blogs
• E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-
mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more
content-heavy
• Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other
merchants during the registration process on their own website
• Shopping directories that list merchants by categories
• Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the
advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates
• Websites using adbars (e.g. AdSense) to display context-sensitive, highly relevant
ads for products on the site
9. Affiliate Marketing
Some Reputable Affiliate Programs
http://www.cj.com Commission Junction
http://www.shareasale.com Share a Sale
http://www.linkshare.com LinkShare
10. Affiliate Marketing
Avoid Affiliate Marketing Scams
“Information” products, tools promising you big income
with little work in no time
“Systems” promising you big income with little work in
no time
Unknown Affiliate Networks
12. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Websites AP (After Penguin)
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76465
• Our Webmaster Guidelines advise you to create websites with original content that adds
value for users. This is particularly important for sites that participate in affiliate programs.
Typically, affiliate websites feature product descriptions that appear on sites across that
affiliate network. As a result, sites featuring mainly content from affiliate networks can suffer
in Google's search rankings, because they do not have enough unique content that
differentiates them from other sites on the web.
• Google believes that pure, or "thin," affiliate websites do not provide additional value for
web users, especially if they are part of a program that distributes its content to several
hundred affiliates. These sites generally appear to be cookie-cutter sites or templates with no
original content. Because a search results page could return several of these sites, all with the
same content, thin affiliates create a frustrating user experience.
13. Affiliate Marketing
Do: NoFollow Affiliate Links
• nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of
an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a
hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the
search engine’s index.
• So when you create a nofollow link to a site, you’re telling
search engines not to use that link as a factor in figuring out
the site’s rank in their search results.
Resource: Affiliate Link Cloaking, Tracking, Organizing
Pretty Link Pro http://prettylinkpro.com
14. Affiliate Marketing
Disclosure Statements: Necessary; Maybe Not So Bad
How to Turn Affiliate Marketing Disclosure Into a Selling Point
http://www.copyblogger.com/affiliate-marketing-disclosure
• Disclose With Confidence and Make More, Not Less
• Being completely frank with your readers about compensation can be scary,
because you think people will think less of you. But in a cynical world where
everyone thinks everyone else is on the take already, honesty becomes a selling
point.
Are You Afraid of Your Audience?
• If you’re delivering constant value, most people won’t mind… as long as you’re
honest. Sure, you’ll have a few vocal readers with an enlarged sense of entitlement
who expect you to work for free, but ignore them.
• And if it turns out that the majority of your audience actually does mind you
making some money for your efforts while delivering honest reviews and
recommendations…
• Perhaps you’ve attracted the wrong audience.
15. Affiliate Marketing
Wordpress Makes it Easy
Plugins:
Data Feedr http://www.datafeedr.com/how
Pretty Link Pro http://prettylinkpro.com
Tools and Plugins for Affiliates
http://www.amnavigator.com/blog/category/useful-tools-for-affiliates-and-merchants/
Affiliate Articles and Publications
http://www.amnavigator.com/blog/category/articles-publications/
16. Affiliate Marketing
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Social Media Marketing or Affiliate Marketing?
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