What Is This Whole "Affiliate Marketing" Deal?
Good evening!
I just recieved this great question from a friend interested in what he's heard me babbling about recently:
That's an excellet question to address for those of you that are hearing about it for the first time.
What Is An Affiliate Program?
This is a program that a website owner creates in order to help him sell his product. He creates a program where affiliates, in otherwords individual advertisers, use their internet marketing skills to expose the product to as many people as possible that are willing to buy the product. They pay for whatever means they choose to use, and get a certain preset percentage of the sale, called a commission. The percentage of the sale can range anywhere from %1 to %75, and often hands around the %50 mark. From the affiliate's prospective, the goal is to introduce the product to as many targeted customers as possible. Targeted customers are best found by letting them come to you. This is where adwords comes in. When someone searches for a keyword in Google, they more than likely have an interest in it. With adwords you can specify what keyword searches should prompt your ads to show.
Targetting Your Ads
Now more about targetting your ads. Targetting your ads is highly important if you want to keep your costs down, and your click-to-sale ratio up (and that, ultimately, is the goal of all affiliate advertisers). You want to pay less and get more out of it.
When someone searches for "buying fluff" in google, they're clearly interested in getting their hands on this "fluff" product. You don't care why or what it is, you just want them to buy it from you, so you make a comission. "Buying fluff" can be a terribly broad search though. What if the customer is actually interested in a certain type of fluff? You wouldn't want your "buying fluff" ad to attract all sorts of customers that may or may not be interested in the type of "fluff" you're selling. Also, the customer may not be interested in buying from a site that seems so painfully generic and uniterested. If this is an important subject to the user, they'll be more likely to buy if they see an interest from the advertiser too. So you should narrow your ad. You change your ad to "buying pink fluff". Good, but you can do better. Often, customers prefer to buy from a location they can relate to, specifically they're home town or city, or even just state or country. So you change your ad to "buying pink fluff in San Francisco". Now, if someone searches for that, you can be quite sure that if they see that there's an ad exactly for what they're trying to buy, they'll go onto the vendor's site with confidence that they can find it there.
Of course, such a targeted ad won't bring in many sales on its own. So you have to make more of them. As you can see, targetting your ads can be very time consuming. The more you target, the more ads you have to create to cover all the other possiby colors of fluff, and then all the locations where someone might want to buy that color of fluff, and then repeat until you've covered all the possibilites. In the interest of time, you may be tempted to make the ads less targeted and just bring in more traffic to them. You'll pay more for this, and you'll get a lower sale percentage, but if you're willing to cut your profit and just try to make it up with sheer volume, its up to you. You have to be careful not to get lazy and unmotivated and just stick horribly general ads that will get clicked on, but won't get any sales. Many new affiliates in the making get impatient after their first sale, and want to see many more come in very quickly, so they overload on the traffic, or make more general ads. Then, once they end up paying a lot of money for limited to no sales, they get discouraged and quit. Learn from the mistakes of others, and don't follow in their steps.
Luckily, there are programs out there that can help you with this keyword process and make it less time consuming. Some are expensive, some don't work, but some are absolutely worth the cost, and quickly make it up. More on this in the next blog update.
Sincerely,
=T=
PS Remember, get your friends involved if you can! Its much easier to have someone learning as you are. You can bounce ideas off each other, and share helpful tips you learn along the way. So adobt the buddy system of marketing, and join up! The eWealth community is another great place to get your questions answered.
I just recieved this great question from a friend interested in what he's heard me babbling about recently:
"What is this whole 'affiliate marketing' deal?"
That's an excellet question to address for those of you that are hearing about it for the first time.
What Is An Affiliate Program?
This is a program that a website owner creates in order to help him sell his product. He creates a program where affiliates, in otherwords individual advertisers, use their internet marketing skills to expose the product to as many people as possible that are willing to buy the product. They pay for whatever means they choose to use, and get a certain preset percentage of the sale, called a commission. The percentage of the sale can range anywhere from %1 to %75, and often hands around the %50 mark. From the affiliate's prospective, the goal is to introduce the product to as many targeted customers as possible. Targeted customers are best found by letting them come to you. This is where adwords comes in. When someone searches for a keyword in Google, they more than likely have an interest in it. With adwords you can specify what keyword searches should prompt your ads to show.
Targetting Your Ads
Now more about targetting your ads. Targetting your ads is highly important if you want to keep your costs down, and your click-to-sale ratio up (and that, ultimately, is the goal of all affiliate advertisers). You want to pay less and get more out of it.
When someone searches for "buying fluff" in google, they're clearly interested in getting their hands on this "fluff" product. You don't care why or what it is, you just want them to buy it from you, so you make a comission. "Buying fluff" can be a terribly broad search though. What if the customer is actually interested in a certain type of fluff? You wouldn't want your "buying fluff" ad to attract all sorts of customers that may or may not be interested in the type of "fluff" you're selling. Also, the customer may not be interested in buying from a site that seems so painfully generic and uniterested. If this is an important subject to the user, they'll be more likely to buy if they see an interest from the advertiser too. So you should narrow your ad. You change your ad to "buying pink fluff". Good, but you can do better. Often, customers prefer to buy from a location they can relate to, specifically they're home town or city, or even just state or country. So you change your ad to "buying pink fluff in San Francisco". Now, if someone searches for that, you can be quite sure that if they see that there's an ad exactly for what they're trying to buy, they'll go onto the vendor's site with confidence that they can find it there.
Of course, such a targeted ad won't bring in many sales on its own. So you have to make more of them. As you can see, targetting your ads can be very time consuming. The more you target, the more ads you have to create to cover all the other possiby colors of fluff, and then all the locations where someone might want to buy that color of fluff, and then repeat until you've covered all the possibilites. In the interest of time, you may be tempted to make the ads less targeted and just bring in more traffic to them. You'll pay more for this, and you'll get a lower sale percentage, but if you're willing to cut your profit and just try to make it up with sheer volume, its up to you. You have to be careful not to get lazy and unmotivated and just stick horribly general ads that will get clicked on, but won't get any sales. Many new affiliates in the making get impatient after their first sale, and want to see many more come in very quickly, so they overload on the traffic, or make more general ads. Then, once they end up paying a lot of money for limited to no sales, they get discouraged and quit. Learn from the mistakes of others, and don't follow in their steps.
Luckily, there are programs out there that can help you with this keyword process and make it less time consuming. Some are expensive, some don't work, but some are absolutely worth the cost, and quickly make it up. More on this in the next blog update.
Sincerely,
=T=
PS Remember, get your friends involved if you can! Its much easier to have someone learning as you are. You can bounce ideas off each other, and share helpful tips you learn along the way. So adobt the buddy system of marketing, and join up! The eWealth community is another great place to get your questions answered.
posted by smokersix at 8:45 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home