Make Money | Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

Three Ways to Increase Your Click and Lead Quality

When it comes to online advertising, it’s all about the “click“! However, the dynamic of what makes the person click is what is really important. When you are promoting an offer on a pay per click basis, it’s extremely important to keep your quality at a higher rate, but the same results apply when pushing a cost per action based offer too. The bottom line is, you want to be providing quality traffic for your advertisers. The better traffic and leads you can send their way, the more likely they will increase their ad spending with you, and will have a much longer and successful relationship.

Let’s look at three different ways you can start increasing the quality of your click throughs and leads generated.

Stop Trying to Trick the User

Remember those banners that would flash non stop and say that you were the millionth visitor and were awarded a prize? Those banners were doing exactly the opposite of what we are talking about here. They were going after as much traffic as they could possibly get, then sending their visitors to an email/zip submit type of offer. The data provided usually has a very fast turn over rate, and is sold to multiple media/ad buyers.

Instead of trying to trick your audience into clicking on a link, think about the ways that you can relate to your audience and make them want to convert. While an insane blinking banner may bring in a lot of clicks, the conversions might be terrible. Spend more time on targeting the right audience and giving them banners they want to see and can relate to. Your cost per click may be higher, but you will also see higher conversions and provide the end advertiser with better quality leads.

Make the User WANT to Click

One of the best ways to find an audience of people who are anxious to click on your little blue text links, is to provide them with exactly what they are looking for. Let’s take review and coupon sites for example. How many times were you searching for a product or service to buy, and you were just looking for the right review or coupon code? Once you found the information you were looking for, you would gladly click on a link in their web site to go forward with the sale or purchase.

This is exactly why coupon and review sites do so well. When is the last time you did a search for “web hosting reviews” on Google? The web sites paying to rank for these terms are paying a lot of money for where they rank, but all of the traffic to these sites are high quality. Sure, the site owners are probably getting $100+ in commissions per sale, but they know they can convert their traffic because they are providing exactly what their site visitors are looking for.

Pre-Sell Your Audience: Withholding the Click!

Another excellent example of getting high quality click throughs is through the use of video marketing. We can relate to this method all too well. How many times have you received an email from another guru/marketer, and you have to wait and watch their annoying video before being able to click to the next page and/or place your order?

It’s annoying, but it works! By making the viewer not be able to click away from the page, it’s actually making them listen and watch your video, with is continually selling them on the dreams of what their product can do for you… further increasing the chances they will stick around and buy once that final “Click Here to Purchase” link becomes available.

What Type of Traffic Are Your Providing?

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a market and business of cheap, dirty and crap leads… but when you are looking for long term and high end commissions, lead quality is where your focus should be. When promoting any ad campaign and pushing volume, it’s important to keep in touch with your ad network or the advertiser directly. If you are pushing quality leads that continue to convert on their backend, they will gladly send a few more dollars your way to increase the volume and reward you for your efforts!

17 December, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money 10 Comments

How to Study, Break Down and Promote an Affiliate Offer

Gone are the days when you simply throw up a bunch of affiliate offer banners and hope for the best. Well, you still can do that, but you are destined for failure, and why would you want to anyway? With all of the information and targeting that you now have right in your hands, how can you pass up on the extra due diligence to make sure your ad campaign succeeds.

A new pet affiliate network that I’m working with has a wide variety of affiliate offers that any pet lover, pet blog or resource web site would love. While looking through their selection of offers, I thought it would be a great idea to take one of these offers, then show how you can study what you know about the offer, then start promoting it through different sources.

One of the well branded offers on the network is PetCareRX, which is a discount pet supplies and medication web site. The offer pays $30 per signup and is only for email promotion, but there are plenty of other offers on the network which allow other methods such as banners, social and web site advertising. Since PetCareRX is a well known brand, let’s go through some of the different ways we can research the company/offer, then build a campaign around their site.

Quantcast User Demographics

First let’s run over to Quantcast.com and pull a demographics report on the type of visitors that are going to PetCareRX.com. Right away we can see some key figure in the chart below. The ones with blue have the majority of percentage for each demographic. At a quick glance it looks like we have mostly females, who are 35-50+, caucasian, have no kids and a mid range income. While the information may not be 100% accurate, it’s a great way to get a quick feel on the type of demographics that might perform best with your offers.

Plenty of Fish = Plenty of Pet Owners

Next let’s head over to ads.pof.com and create some ad campaigns to promote PetCareRX. We aren’t going to focus on ad copy right now, but instead how easy is it for you to take what you learned from Quantcast, then put it into action at POF.

Check out the screenshot below from within the POF ads manager. How cool is that? I just targeted all of the demographics that were pointed out above, but I was also able to go even a step further and target only pet owners!

Facebook Ads = 1 Million Pet Lovers

While Plenty of Fish doesn’t tell you exactly how many pet owners they have on the network, the next best thing is to head over to Facebook Ads and create a campaign targeted to people that already have an interest in “Dogs” and “Cats”… and by the way, just targeting those two terms in the US brings in over 1 MILLION users! You can even target “PetcareRX” on Facebook interests, and reach 6,000+ die hard fans. Think about all of the other popular pet web sites and interests that could be targeted.

Google Keyword / Site Search

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what keywords and search terms PetCareRX were bidding on to bring people to their site, or what long tail keywords people are coming across in the search engines, and getting to their site? Sure enough, we can do that! Head over to the Google Keyword tool and run a report, but not under the keyword section, but instead for the petcarerx.com web site. Google will then pull up a massive report of relevant keywords that you can use to advertising your landing pages and search engine marketing.

Help, I Need More Banners & Ad Copy!

It’s a growing trend that affiliate networks are not providing as many banners and ad copies as they used to. For such a scenario, you can usually head over to Moat or MixRank and pull up a ton of banners and creatives that are running through out the web. Unfortunately neither of these sites had any banners or creatives for PetCareRX… what to do? Get old school and head over to Google Images and perform a search for the domain name / site you want to advertise, then use the “Exact Size” feature and you will probably find some banners that you were looking for, like the screenshot below.

Putting Everything You Know into Action

Woah, we just covered a mega ton of information on how to promote an offer. Best of all, this same process can be used to break down any affiliate offer or web site out there. In this example, PetCareRX was only available for email promotion, but imagine of how many other campaigns are out there for social networking, cpv, search and banner advertising… a ton! Never before has it been so easy to break down WHO is buying WHAT, and how you can TARGET their exact DEMOGRAPHICS in an ad campaign.

Since I’ve already laid out everything for you on how to make money with pet affiliate offers, why not head over to PetAffiliateNetwork.com and check out what other offers they have on the network.

12 December, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is a popular book in the self-help community. It’s a book with many layers and a lot of online marketers have difficulty applying the underlying principles to their own lives. In this post want I want to relate the seven habits explained in the book to online marketers and how you can apply them.

1. Be proactive

The first three habits are about taking charge of yourself. Thus, the first habit is about being proactive.

One of the reasons people want to get into online marketing is to escape the 9-to-5 and to be able to work anywhere with a laptop and access to the Internet. Now to get this freedom for yourself, you have to take initiative and this is where most newcomers fall off the boat.

People who are new to the this industry will look for other successful online marketers and study how they made it big. There is nothing wrong with this, but the problem I see over and over is that people get stuck in this research phase. Very few people get past the hump to take action. Instead, most think that it will happen on a random day that they escape the cubicle life.

This is not being proactive. Instead, it is time to get started. Stop reading how others have made it, and start moving forward to the land of the New Rich. Focus on yourself and put steps forward to stack that paper. Whether that means registering a new domain, hiring someone, or putting money into a campaign….just do it. Don’t wait for the right moment. The right moment is now.

2. Begin with the end in mind

Now that you are putting in the effort, the next habit is about having clarity in what exactly you want to achieve. You need to be absolutely clear with yourself that you want to go this path of making a living online. This habit is about envisioning a picture in your mind of what it feels like to have escaped the 9-to-5 and to have made it. You want to be able to smell the success. You can vividly imagine how different your life is going to be. It’s like you can almost touch it.

If you don’t have a clear picture in your head of how much better your life is going to be, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to achieve your goal. It is like driving in foggy weather. You can’t see far ahead, you can’t go fast, you hesitate a lot and frustrating be drive in those conditions. On the other hand, having clarity is like driving your car at full speed with a GPS system and a beautiful girl next to you. It’s fun, comfortable and you get to your destination fast.

Once you have this vivid picture in your head, achieving that goal is going to be a huge force in overcoming obstacles. Motivation comes and goes, but by having the end in mind, you can go through the ups and lows because you know how much of an impact the end result will have on your life. Once you know what your desired life looks like with a burning to desire, I will have no doubt that you will get there.

3. Put first things first

Now that you are actively putting yourself in motion by being proactive and by gaining clarity, the third habit is about figuring out the steps to get to your destination. The idea behind “putting first things first” is that you are able to prioritize the things you need to do to achieve your goal. The previous habit is about knowing what your end result is, and this habit is all about making sure you are always working on things that bring you closer to that end result.

There are a lot of ways to make your first buck online. One is not necessarily better than the other, but for each you need to be able to prioritize what needs to get done first. Most new online marketers think reading and researching is the most important part. In reality, this is not the case at all. Speed of implementation, building up your bankroll, and testing the market are actually far more important. These are things that you should do as soon as possible.

Put your first dollar on the line as soon as possible, then do some reading. While getting more knowledge is not a bad thing, it is usually not the most important thing to do. Try things out and then read on how you can improve what you have tested or setup. Always do the things that are the most important which bring you closer to your goal. When in doubt, be proactive and take action.

4. Think Win/Win

The following three habits are about cooperation. It is no secret that every successful online marketer has good relationships with others like the affiliate networks, partnerships, joint ventures, and his own staff.

To surround yourself with great people and to have to those relationships, you need to work on the habit of thinking win/win. This fourth habit is crucial for becoming an successful online marketer. Strive to have agreements with people that benefit everyone, not just yourself.

Take for example your relationship with your affiliate managers. A lot of people look at the affiliate manager and affiliate’s relationship as a division of roles where the affiliate is giving the most value and the affiliate manager’s job is just facilitating the affiliate. You would think the affiliate is the one making all the money, right? That’s not completely true.

Most affiliate managers get bonuses and have commissions if they do well, so they have an interest for their affiliates to do well. Knowing that, when you communicate with your affiliate manager, think win-win.

How can both of you become better off when you two work together? Let your affiliate manager know that you have his or her interest in mind because this helps you build a better relationship with your affiliate manager. And the better the relationship, the more the affiliate manager will help you to do well which him or herself too. You win. He or she wins. The network wins. Everyone wins.

This does not only apply to your affiliate manager, but anyone you want to become friends with or work with, such as your traffic sources representatives, people on your team, and so on.

5. Seek to understand first, then be understood

Once you have the cooperation of the other people, the next habit will help you strengthen that relationship even more. Covey talks about “seeking to understand first, then to be understood” to encourage you to build a relationship where both people are on the same page and respect each other.

The gist of this habit is that you have good relationships with people but it starts with initially setting aside your own agenda and being open to be hearing other people out. Most people are ego-centric and have no empathy for the other person. That is not a great way of strengthen a relationship. Put away your own agenda and hear out what others have to say to you, then see how you can help each other out.

This is especially useful for networking and I have seen this first hand how effective this habit is. The people at the conferences who don’t apply this habit are the ones who broadcast the loudest how great they are. Instead, the effective people are the ones hearing out what online marketers need and then seek out a solution if there is a match. As you can see, this goes hand-in-hand with the previous habit. By hearing out others and thinking win/win, you can have effective cooperation.

6. Synergize

At this point, you have your people around you, everyone is onboard and on the same page. Now it is time to work together and make it happen. This habit is about working together to take things to the next level.

The reality is, nobody becomes successful by themselves. That is why it has been emphasized by the previous two habits how important relationships are for effectiveness.

Even though it might seem that a lot of online marketers are famous (some even infamous) because of the work they did and they have a personal brand, you usually never see the team behind that person and the relationships he or she has. Usually they have other online marketers sharing advice, the affiliate managers, the representative of a variety of traffic sources, and a team of people working with the marketer.

Don’t get me wrong, you can be successful by doing all the work yourself. That doesn’t mean it is the most effective way to do it. The idea behind this habit is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Work with other people and bring each other up. That is why in the online space you’ll see plenty of joint ventures going on, but for someone who is just starting internet marketing you have to do it differently. Start building a team, work with your affiliate managers, and connect with other online marketers so you can work together to go to the next level.

7. Sharpen the saw

The last habit is about self-renewal. As you continue to work for long periods of time your productivity goes down unless you regularly review your work and your life. The book gives the analogy of a woodcutter who works every day, but becomes less productive over time because he refuses to take time out to sharpen the saw.

In the beginning it is all about hustling and working your way up, but don’t forget to take breaks while you’re doing it. Especially when you have hit milestones, zoom out and think of why it went well. Or if you didn’t make any major progress, try to see what happened and how you can improve things. Especially when you do a lot of testing and work on your campaigns, you need to sharpen the saw on a regular basis.

This guest post was written by +Thanh Pham, a writer and productivity nerd who regularly blogs about time management.

18 November, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Make Money

The Hard Work Behind Every Successful Small Business

Let’s face it… running an online business takes a lot of dedication and work. It’s stressful and needs to be treated like a real business. Just because we have blogs, conference parties and seems like everything is cake, there is really a ton of grunt work that is put into every ad campaign, web site and blog that finds success. Running a small business is serious work, and should be treated no differently than any other business or life changing task.

The Idea of Running Your Own Small Business

There’s two types of people in the world. Those who work for themselves, and those who work for other people. There is nothing wrong with the path you decide to take, and running your own business definitely isn’t for everyone. If you have a family and costs that need to be paid, it will take a lot of work, dedication and sacrifice to have those responsibilities looming over your head month after month without a secure pay check coming in every week.

With all of that said, the benefits of running your own business can pay off big. Along with all of the stress and dedication, comes big benefits such as potentially making a lot of money, being your own boss, and building a business the way you want and maybe even selling for millions of dollars in the future. You can only work so many hours, and make a limited amount of money when you are working for someone else, but when it’s your own business, you are in control of your salary and the business’ earnings.

What Does It Take to Run a Small Business

Personally for me, it was an undying drive and dedication that brought me to where I am today. I always had a passion for business and thinking up new ways to make money. When I first started making money online, I was around 15 years old, and didn’t have a lot of financial responsibilities, which helped put me in a unique position to start my own business. At the same time, I was also investing everything I made right back into the business, and never took any investment money or loans to start the company. I started from scratch, learned everything I could about making web sites and affiliate marketing and everything else that has brought me to where I am today.

So what does it take for YOU to start your own business online? I keep saying it, but it’s the truth, you actually NEED to WANT to do this. I have so many friends that think I am so “lucky” to be where I am, but there are thousands of hours and blood, sweat and tears behind every successful business. For every successful idea, there are thousands of wasted hours and dollars lost in failed ideas. The bottom line is, you need to have the drive to keep going til you hit that next big success!

Depending on what type of business you want to create, you will need some investment money. To start with a web site or blog, your investment is minimal (not counting advertising dollars). You can get started with a domain and web hosting for just a few dollars a year. If you wanted to focus on affiliate marketing and creating ad campaigns, you would want to start with at least $500-$5000 to get an idea of how campaigns works, while turning them profitable.

For every successful web site or ad campaign we build, there are tons of failures we’ve hit before them. The difference between those who succeed and fail, is the driving passion and dedication to not fail, and keep working those extra long nights and learning what it takes to make a profit.

You Have an Established Small Business… Now What?

Congratulations, you now have a successful business and are your own boss, now what? All the time people are saying “Why would they keep working?“, in reference to the millionaires and billionaires out there running big companies. The answer is simple, go right back to what we talked about in step one… it’s all about the passion! When you are in business long enough, and doing well at it, it’s more like a game than anything else. You want to keep succeeding, hitting new levels (whether that is revenue or personal goals).

This is the driving force behind every business and online marketer who stays up to 5am in the morning, continually pushing out new ad campaigns, and pushing conversions for that extra 1%. We are the future of business and if this is the game you want to play, you have to take it seriously and never doubt yourself for a second!

I received compensation from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. This post was sponsored by Visa Small Business as part of their #gobiz Sweepstakes for @VisaSmallBusiness. Visa will be rewarding small business owners with $10,000 in prizes for their hard work from October 25^th through November 17^th. Visit here http://hosting.thetenthwave.com/visasb/ for more details, and follow @VisaSmallBiz for ways to help make your small business more efficient and successful. Discover more at http://visa.com/business.

08 November, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Make Money

Flip This Web Site – 77% Off Through oDigger

Having already sold a few thousand copies of my “Flip This Web Site” guide I released a few months ago, I was approached by oDigger.com to bring an exclusive deal to my readers and users of their site. If you haven’t seen oDigger already, it’s just like Groupon, but focused on affiliate marketing software, products and courses. The original price of my web site flipping guide was $67, but is now an insanely reduced price of only $14.99, which is 77% off!

Flip This Web Site $67 – Now Only $14.99

This is a limited time promotion through oDigger, so if you haven’t grabbed your copy already please do! Get the book!

Since the release of the book, the business of buying and selling web sites on Flippa has just been exploding. With over $77,000 in new site sales every day on the web site, it’s truly become the world’s largest marketplace for buying and selling web sites. From $50 sales, all the way up to $1.1 million, Flippa has been responsible for some huge web site acquisitions.

Let’s take a look at some of the recent news and posts that have been written on Flippa and the type of web sites that are selling on their marketplace.

What’s New in the Web Site Flipping World?

Make Money with Angry Birds Web Sites – We all know that Angry Birds is one of the fastest and most profitable companies around when it comes to apps and online gaming. But they aren’t the only ones. Many web site owners are creating Angry Birds related web sites and selling them for thousands of dollars through Flippa.
Flippa Increases their Success Fees by 400% – The title actually sounds worse than it is, but I believe it was a necessary change for Flippa to make. This major pricing change will only affect sellers, and sites that sell for more than $40,000.
Flippa Kills Their Trust Score – Another big change to Flippa recently, was their change from their old “Trust Score” to a new system that would show only feedback, but also the amount of revenue done through their account. This a great new feature and gives sellers a much better idea of who is bidding on their web sites.
Celebrity Gossip Blogs that Have Sold for 6 Figures on Flippa – It’s always great to see how others are making web sites and selling them for big money on Flippa. This post will show you two celebrity and entertainment based web sites that have sold for over six figures!

The latest version of Flip This Web Site is now over 150 pages and has been updated with all of the latest changes to Flippa, along with a few tips and case studies. Grab your copy now.

01 November, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money