Posts Tagged ‘affiliate’

You Found Your Niche; Now Find Your Nano-niche.

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

ramachandran-photo.jpg The world of affiliate marketing is immense. Those who are already in the affiliate marketing space know that breaking into this world can be a challenge, especially if you’re trying to promote a product or service that thousands of others are already promoting.

Many successful affiliates have found that if you really try to promote your “niche,” you will have greater success in driving sales. However, now that many current and prospective affiliate marketers know this trick of the trade if you will, it’s time to take it one step further.

What we are talking about comes from the idea of nano-niche marketing. Just like the Apple Nano is the smaller version of the iPod, a nano-niche is a smaller, more specific version of your niche.

Everyone has a niche, whether it is a hobby, or a sport, or simply some topic you know a lot about. For example, common hobbies include crafts, art or music. A nano-niche is breaking the hobby down one step further — a craft could be knitting hats, art could be painting landscapes, music could be the clarinet for beginners, etc.

The point is, the smaller you can focus your niche, the more focused you can make all of your affiliate marketing efforts (i.e. your blog, your video, etc). By honing in on a specific audience group, you can tailor your efforts and really engage with your audience. And the fact of the matter is, the more targeted your niche can be, the more likely it is that there will be an audience out there that has yet been reached.

Ultimately, successful affiliate marketing relies on driving sales through promotion. Therefore, if you are able to target and drive very specific traffic to your website, your conversion rates will be higher than just marketing to a huge general audience – driving your sales up immensely.

Although many people new to the affiliate marketing industry think to go big right off the bat, it is in fact more likely you will find success in the nano-niche, in the targeted and specific areas that others have yet to discover. So instead of going big, take that one extra step to go small – right to the audience that really wants and needs your product or service.

Dush Ramachandran is vice president of sales and business development at ClickBank.

5 Easy-to-Implement Affiliate Marketing Tips for DRTV Marketers

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

molander.jpg Tired of the same old tips and tricks about web affiliate marketing programs? “Communicate with them, treat them with respect” yada-yada. What about what really works? I pulled together a group of my most experienced, thought-leading colleagues to find out what’s moving the needle in affiliate marketing today. The below innovations are what I discovered. I’m happy to share these best practices. Yes, they can be quickly and easily applied—helping you manage your affiliates and extract maximum sales efficiency. Stay tuned to Electronic Retailer’s blog for candid interviews with these experts where they’ll “go deep” to reveal their secrets to success.

1. Allow affiliates to access a knowledge-driven feedback loop to improve their ROI and, as a result, increase yours.
a. Let affiliates “connect the ROI dots” between their investments (media spending) and your ultimate success (sales or new customers).
b. Provide select, trusted affiliates with limited, yet unfettered, access to your internal metrics and customer behavior data.

2. Strengthen relationships with superstar affiliates and open doors for potential superstars by actively, yet cautiously, investing hard and soft dollars in them.
a. Invest in affiliates: Underwrite affordable, educational opportunities and conferences for them. Sponsoring affiliates is very popular in the European realm.
b. Sponsor low-cost, virtual innovation forums and webinars that offer training opportunities for top affiliates.
c. Provide limited access to web metrics (i.e., Google Analytics, Omniture) and optimization tools that are already at your disposal, yet possess a high perceived (and applied!) value among affiliates.
d. Invest in affiliates: Subsidize the media buying of select, high-value affiliates by providing matching contributions to their expenditures or allowing access to your media buying prowess.

3. Develop and communicate a clear, well-reasoned search marketing policy to affiliates.
a. Audit your affiliate program for confluence with paid (PPC) search advertising efforts.
b. Understand value driven by affiliates across various categories based on audit results that demonstrate “triggers” of sales transactions.
c. Create business rules that negate and approve affiliate commissions based on logical rules that are shared openly and pro-actively with affiliates.
d. Understand where your search engine optimization “sweet spot” is by identifying where you want to spend time, energy (money). Assign “long tail” search terms/keywords (those able to generate less referral volume) to affiliates for their monetization efforts.

4. Experiment with social media affiliates.
a. Scale your most precious resource, time: Use new tools, such as Syntryx, to rapidly prospect for qualified affiliates.
b. Provide affiliates with access to helpful, innovative Web 2.0 linking technologies like Linkshare’s FlexLinks or Amazon’s various tools ranging from “SiteStripe” to widgets.
c. Give affiliates access to product data, coupons and other content via flexible, RSS-enabled technologies.

5. Consider creative, new approaches to paying and bonusing affiliates based on performance.
a. Throttle up payouts among performers who drive volume at a reasonable cost, considering channel confluence issues, etc.
b. Throttle down payouts among under-performers who’ve been given a fair chance, but are not performing on a quarterly basis.

Stay tuned for more actionable tips and interviews with experts in a variety of performance-focused web marketing strategies.

Jeff Molander is a leading Web marketing expert, author and speaker. He is CEO of Molander & Associates Inc.

The Scoop on NewEgg – Streamlined Sales Tax

Monday, September 8th, 2008

picture.jpg As you may have heard, NewEgg has stopped collecting sales tax from New York customers. Unlike Amazon, which has initiated litigation challenging New York’s tax policies, or Overstock.com, which has cut New York affiliate programs in order to avoid the tax, NewEgg has taken a new path. Some insiders suggest it may also be “restructuring” its affiliate programs as well, but it seems likely the company also expects enforcement to be too costly for the New York state government. Because NewEgg is a California company that does not have a physical location in New York, any kind of enforcement will likely involve extensive legal challenges before the courts can even determine where the case should be tried. Then, there is an extremely strong Constitutional argument that the New York law cannot extend to businesses that do not have a physical nexus in the state. NewEgg will probably also argue that its affiliates are structured in a way that has never subjected the company to the law.

All of this litigation would be extremely costly. The New York state government only expected to collect $50 million a year in total, and now companies are ditching their New York affiliates to avoid the tax, so the revenue generating potential of this tax is pretty low. The amount the state could collect from NewEgg if it wins the challenge would, of course, only be a fraction of that amount. Plus, there is evidence politicians are feeling pressure from constituents, including customers and advertising agencies, to suspend this tax. The New York State Senate has already passed a bill to repeal it. All this said, NewEgg might be taking a risk, but with extremely high consumer ratings and a steady stream of cash, it can probably afford it.

Tomi Turner works in ERA’s government affairs department.