Affiliate Marketing: A Cool Stress Free Way to Make Money Online

Ginette Degner will motivate and teach you about affiliate marketing. Learn how to create an effective affiliate marketing campaign that actually puts money in your pocket. Why should merchants consider affiliate marketing? Why should you? Learn best practices.

  Recorded Live: Feb 24, 2006 Segment 1; Segment 2; Segment 3

Segment 1: Become an affiliate marketer and earn a living working from home.
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Go beyond posting banners and learn how to choose the right affiliate marketing programs for you. Learn what you need to do to become a super affiliate.

Segment 2: The Power of Affiliate Marketing for Merchants
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Learn why merchants should consider affiliate marketing and what role they play in training their affiliate marketers.

Segment 3: Affiliate Network Programs to Compliment Your Marketing Campaign
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Ginette will share her thoughts on some of the affiliate network programs available to marketers and what key points merchants should be aware of when shopping for a program.

Show Links:

Search Engine Diva

Search Engine Workshops

Kowabunga

Performics

Commission Junction

Affiliate Marketing Campaign: A Cool Stress Free Way to Make Money Online Summary

Affiliate marketing is a stress free way to make money. In the 24th February 2006 edition of the eMarketing talk show, Ginette Degner of KowaBunga Technologies tells us why merchants should consider affiliate marketing and what role they play in training their affiliate marketers.

In case you are a merchant wanting to start a marketing campaign with affiliate, she also talks about the different affiliate network programs available.

Ginette has been active in Search Engine marketing and affiliate marketing since 1993. She is also a research specialist and writer for Search Engine Workshops.

Become an affiliate marketer and earn a living working from home

We wonder how affiliate marketers earn their money. Basically what happens is that merchants reward an affiliate for sending them traffic that converts into a sale. This is paid for performance marketing.

The merchant can set it up to where an affiliate can earn a commission or a reward for an actual sale. So instead for just paying for clicks or paying for getting your banner someplace, you only have to pay when your affiliate produces a sale for you.

So affiliate marketing is a very cost effective way for a merchant to acquire customers because they only have to pay on a sale or an actual acquisition, they don't have to pay for advertising costs.

Ginette Degner specializes in both the merchant side and the affiliate side because her job is to help affiliates produce more and she has to understand their experiences in order to help the merchants to help them.

The goal is to help the affiliates produce more for the merchants. When sales materialize, the affiliates make money and the merchants make money. If you are a 'super affiliate', you make a lot of money for the merchant and for yourself.

Oftentimes affiliate marketing can account for as much as 20% of a company's earnings, which is a lot of money over a period of time. In addition, the company is able to reach out and touch so much more of the market place. As a marketer, if you try to advertise in all the little niche markets where you thought you could reach potential customers, the process proves to be both expensive and time consuming.

However, if you work with affiliates that already have those niche markets and you're only paying them when those markets give you a sale, you're saving a lot of money.

Sometimes, the biggest difficulty that arises is that the software that the affiliate uses doesn't work with the merchant's shopping cart. A lot of times the shopping cart pieces are not open to an affiliate programs and usually it is difficult if you are working with a network that has a set way of doing things as their set software cannot be customized.

This is where the KowaBunga program named 'My Affiliate Software' comes in because it is completely customized for each client. You can use it to:

• Track sales
• Track leads
• Pay affiliates on different tiers
• Pay different amounts to different affiliates
• Create deals specific to each affiliates

KowaBunga's program gives the users a lot of freedom. It will fit anybodies shoe size.

Merchants of both online and offline businesses use affiliates. An example of an offline business that uses affiliate marketers is Tupperware. However, online affiliate marketers:

• Need an inventory
• Don't have to deal with customer service or support
• Don't write out orders

Online affiliates simply send the customer to the marketer so that a sale takes place.

A wide range of products do really well in the affiliate market place. Ginette's personal preferences are products you can't find in the local store i.e. items that are unique. The best examples are:

• Flank Martini, a company that provides unique niche gifts for martini lovers
• Afro Centre Ltd, which is a company that sells African art, hand made jewelry and items imported from Africa. These are not items that you can find easily.
• Dragondor, which is a fitness company. They sell a product called 'kettle bells' that are so unique. Kettle Bells are a Russian tool for exercise and they look like a cannon ball with a handle.
• Coffee companies. One coffee company has a program pending called 'Green Mountain Coffee. These companies also offer very unique products such as single serving brewers, teas and specialty items that we just don't see in the grocery store or we'd like to have. A lot of these products are niche items.

Then you have other products like seminars and workshops e.g. like 'Search Engine Workshops' has a program and 'The Systems Seminar' has a program. These products are downloadable training materials for people to use, so they are readily available and they are usually quick sells. No shipping time is involved in downloadable products.

Apart from this there are catalogue companies and they'll pay affiliates to get people to subscribe to their mailing catalogue. For them it is a great customer acquisition and they can pay anywhere from $1 to $5 for every person that signs up to receive a catalogue. If the customer places an order, the affiliate may get additional bonuses.

When merchants want to get started with an affiliate program, they should go straight to www.kowabunga.com.

Ginette encourages merchants to test their product and sales material before they start an affiliate program. They should make sure that they have a stable conversion rate i.e. 5% or higher.

Affiliate programs and people involved in it are not a merchant's testing tools. The affiliates are the merchant's partners and merchants need to treat them that way. So, for merchants, 'it is very important that you have already established that your product is going to win and that you're going to do well. Affiliate programs are a way for you to start increasing that reach and increasing what you are doing. It is not a testing ground.'

When you are ready to start an affiliate program, go to a site like KowaBunga and you'll find tons of information. If you know absolutely nothing about affiliate programs, the site will give you a step by step explanation of the process to you i.e. to the merchant.

Driving traffic to a website is not an easy job if you are part of a competitive industry or product. The affiliates get paid when they refer someone that buys a product. Apart from driving traffic to websites, affiliates run Pay per Click campaigns.

Some affiliates actually buy traffic using Google and Yahoo Search marketing in order to throw traffic to you. Such affiliates are actually investing into your company and they are taking a risk by doing this. Hence, such affiliates look for a merchant that has a high conversion rate so that they'll be able to convert better on all of the traffic they send to you.

If an affiliate is using PPC, several tactics are used. For example, you have certain words that are called little hanging fruit i.e. you may bid on the company's trademarks. Some merchants do allow it because they view it as a way to block off whole sections of the ad group. They may be doing the ads and sells but they want the affiliate to be there too so that they block out their competition.

On the other hand, you have merchants who want to protect their brand name and they have all these ideas about their corporate identities and how they want to protect them. However, they're not realizing that they are actually preventing a really awesome affiliate from helping them make a lot more money. These merchants should realize that they can't own everything. They might as well share the wealth.

Google has a rule in the ad part that only 1 domain can be there for a particular keyword so if you try and buy the keyword twice, you can't. Some affiliates use sneaky tactics to get around this. They'll use a sub domain which is 'fake'. This tactic proves to be very profitable at times.

If merchants don't want their affiliates to use sneaky tactics or don't mind them using it, they must decide early on what their policy is going to be. What are they going to allow or disallow.

Ginette encourages merchants to create the ads for the affiliates ahead of time because 'if your worried about your identity or what the ad says, go ahead and create some ads just for affiliates to use. You will need to keep updating the ads so that the affiliates have fresh ads and content.

However, not every affiliate is going to use the ad you give and there are some that will create ads specific to their site. There are 2 different types of affiliates. The first group drives traffic to their own web while the second group i.e. the traffic broker, passes traffic through to the marketer's website.

Basically, these affiliates place a link inside a Google ad and then they pass it through. Hence, they get a cut of that without even having a site. Instead of having a site, they are sending traffic to one of your URLs and pages on a merchant site. They still get their commission and are commonly called traffic brokers or PPC arbitrars.

Affiliates who have a website of their own and want to drive traffic to this site have their own visitor or subscriber base. They talk to this base and are usually is looking for the back end sales.

If I have my own website and want to drive traffic there, I'm going to go ahead and have a PPC ad go there. I may have a page that has an article about a merchant's company or their products i.e. an educational article that I wrote myself or the merchant gave it to me. The customers then go through the article, they find what they want, they are satisfied and they click through the buy.

The advantage is that since I have my own site geared towards this visitor, they know they can come back to me for other products that are related or mean something to them. So I can actually take advantage of that relationship and get that person onto my own mailing list, so that they are not just the merchant's customers, they are 'my' customers too and I can take advantage of a long term relationship.

Typically, affiliates deal with a number of merchants at the same time because a single merchant may not cover all the bases. Some affiliates have as many as 6-7 relationships on the same site.

This makes customers want to go to such an affiliate's site because they find everything there. It is a 'one stop shop' kind of thing. For example, if one merchant doesn't provide a size or colour that is very 'hot' or in demand or has run out of something, they can send the customer to another merchant who has the required items e.g. if an ink jet merchant runs out of a particular cartridge the affiliate can send the customer to another merchant who has it in stock. You give the customer what they want and as a result you win a loyal customer because you at least told them where they can buy things. They almost always appreciate this.

Affiliate can have multiple merchant and vice versa. In affiliate marketing, you get the best of both worlds. The merchant has a role to play in teaching the affiliate to sell more. The merchants set the standards. They give the affiliate tools and examples of best practices.

Since merchants want to increase their profits they must get training first so that they can guide their affiliates. Merchants need to 'share their knowledge in order to succeed e.g. if some technique worked very well on one website, how can your affiliates, if you have many affiliates, take that one idea and expand it in ways that you never even imagined.'

Merchants such as John Decane at Dragonder regularly hire marketing instructors such as ken McCarthy to give tele seminars to affiliates free of charge. At these seminars, best agreed marketing concepts are shared. For merchants, "it is an investment in your performance sales force. It's positive and loyal reinforcement to them. So you get to build more of your program and it pays off because you are building your affiliate."

Ginette's clients use KowaBunga's "Team Affiliate" solution. Ginette does research on the merchant's business and develops a strategy for their affiliate program. This includes:

• Commission structures
• Promotions for affiliates
• Marketing materials
• Data fees

Ginette works with both the Merchant and affiliates to build a relationship between them. The next step involves showing affiliates how to build their side of the business and Ginette takes a look at their sites, providing them with valuable tips and feedback. Ginette urges marketers to give their affiliates all the tools they need to succeed. So whether you're an affiliate or marketer, KowaBunga is the place for you. Visit www.kowabunga.com for more details.

The Power of Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

In the second segment, Ginette gave some great tips about how to start an affiliate marketing program and promote products online.

If you are an affiliate marketer, the first step is to choose something that you enjoy, because starting an affiliate program is hard work. Ginette is a shutterbug. She loves taking pictures so she decided to start a website on which she'd offer these screen savers she had made for free or for a very low cost.

A few other picture lovers visited her site and decided that they wanted to create screen savers too, using the photographs they had taken, but they had no place to host those screensavers. So they requested Ginette to allow them to display their screen savers on her site and she agreed.

Soon, companies that sell screen savers such as Webshots and Freeze approached Ginette and requested her to run their ads on her site. Ginette agreed, but she didn't want to just get $20 a month from each company after going through all the hard work of building the site. So she demanded a share of each sale that they made through her site. She started negotiating with them and built a relationship with them. Gradually, she started billing more sites.

The next powerful technique that affiliate marketers can use is to give a very honest review about the product they are promoting on an appropriate blog. First, you'll have to try out the product. The, on the blog, you can say 'Hey, I tried out this product and it's awesome. This is how you install it etc' and if you found one or two minor shortcomings, mention those briefly too. In this way, you will win the readers' trust.

Next, mention where they can buy this product from i.e. put in either a link to your website of your merchants website. This has more power than any banner or regular ad because it is a real person's opinion.

The third technique you can use when selling e.g. a software product is to run a step by step tutorial on your site about how to install and use that product. Users will find this free tutorial, as well as other details about the product presented on your site very helpful. As a result, you can easily sell them the product (which you are marketing for some merchant) on your site and get your commission.

If you are selling an exercise machine or something on those lines, you can add a video on your site in which you show potential customers how to assemble and use the product.

One of the resellers for Web Position Gold did this. He created a downloadable video tutorial about how to use the product. People ended up buying the product from his affiliate link because the video demo he had created for his website was downloadable and such a demo was not available on any other site- it was unique.

Then you have affiliates who actually start creating products out of tutorials. First they have text tutorials which then progress into graphical user interface where you point and click and it takes you through the whole process. Everybody wants reliable information that can help them. If you can provide such information, people will come back to your site.

In organic search the affiliate will really compete for terms that don't have as high of a threshold in terms of competition. You may look at things that are very specific e.g. if you are selling Bel RX 67 radar detector, you should actually try and target the site towards a specific angel just for you e.g. you may create a site about speed traps. Most affiliate marketers who specialize in selling such products do this. So basically you create a site that actually speaks to the person you want to talk to, which in this case is the person who wants to avoid speed traps.

Once you figure out what type of products you want to sell, visit blogs to see what types of products people like and then visit networks such as Commission Junction, Performex or Colimbo to find other products related to that category. Networks such as these have a collection of affiliate programs, details and ratings. You can go in and compare different programs and see which pays the most, which pays the most often and look at the different affiliate agreements.

In order to avoid duplicate content issues, affiliate marketers who are promoting a product on their website should not use the exact content e.g. article given to them by the merchant(s). They should either add their own comments to the bottom of that article or they should only use a portion of that article.

Most engines recognize what an article is and if they see it on a number of websites, they can figure out who the originator of the article was or they just consider the website that has the highest ranking among the websites posting this article to be the originator or the source for this particular product more than another.

When affiliate links go through certain networks that have a redirect e.g. Commission Junction or Click Think, get devalued a little bit. Ginette experimented with a site that only had an affiliate link and it went through Click Think and it actually got bumped out of the search engines. Ginette took this one link off and changed it with a direct link to the company site, and the page came right back in.

Search Engines and especially directories don't want to be a haven for just affiliate sites; they really just want to have the merchant's main site in their list. In order to avoid this, build your site based on your perspective of the product, don't create your site to be a carbon copy of your merchant's site because you really want to build your own niche in that industry. You'll get traffic from other areas.

Build your site around a topic instead of honing in on one merchant's product or brand name so that you are safe if the merchant decides that they are no longer going to have a program. You can, in such a scenario, quickly change to sell another product for another merchant.

Apart from this, Google Adwords has restrictions about the visible domain in an ad. The intent is to allow fair competition between sites and to appear to have a mix of authors, because if they present too much of the same thing and have no variety they don't look like a good search engine.

The Search Engines want to give their users satisfying results, and the satisfying results are what the user actually clicks through on. Affiliates should use their own domains and use the merchant's domain if they are using PPC. Then you don't have that problem of restriction.

It is very important for the merchant to determine what trademarks the affiliates are allowed to have. Some Pay per Click marketers don't want to work with merchants that restrict trademarks e.g. Adobe didn't want their name in the domain name being used by its affiliate marketers. The marketers had to give up the domain name and were not compensated for it.

Other merchants allow affiliate marketers to use the company trademarks in their domain names. These merchants rather have a piece of the marketplace they don't have to maintain and they are paying the affiliates on performance for it. It is like leasing a domain.

Planet Ocean leases out domains. Ginette took one of these domains and promoted Planet Ocean's products on it as well as the products of other merchants. In return for using this domain, Ginette gave Planet Ocean a certain percentage of what she was earning by using that domain.

Affiliate marketers need to be careful of cookie robbing. A cookie is a text file that is placed on the user's or visitor's computer for tracking. It usually has the merchant's information and the affiliate ID. Cookie robbing is when an adware or spyware product will override your cookie. Normally that adware or spyware company has an agreement with the merchant for a percentage of the profit and you've just been robbed of it because the adware company has this tool that has gone into the user's browser and it will rewrite things.

Unfortunately, the merchants only see that this other affiliate is giving them tons and tons of sales and what he doesn't realize is that they would have gotten the sales anyway through organic search or dispersed over several affiliates. So when you're an affiliate, look for merchants that have a no spyware and no adware policy.

If a merchant whose product you're promoting drops their affiliate program before they pay you, whether or not you can do anything to get your pay depends on the agreement and who's providing their software program to run the affiliate program.

There are some companies that require an escrow account to be put in place for affiliates before the merchants are ever allowed to have a program. Just contact the company, tell them who you are and show them your records of what you have produced in order to make a claim.

Affiliate Network Programs to Compliment Your Marketing Campaign

Link Share, Click Think, Commission Junction, Performex and Kolimbo are all examples of Affiliate Network Programs. The networks are in the area where merchants that participate with that particular software or affiliate program interface are put in a searchable database for affiliates so that they can easily find programs.

A few of the programs like Kolimbo have a single interface and an affiliate can go into and view the statistics of all the programs they participate in at the same time. If you're an affiliate, it makes it a lot easier for tracking how much money you're spending, your sub IDs, all the different ways that you're marketing, the different programs you are using and how they are doing so you can change things based on your performance.

If you're a merchant and you're considering whether or not you should buy some software like Synergics, consider that some shopping cart have affiliate program software built in them. They aren't designed with the affiliates in mind and they are basically meant for tracking.

However, they aren't flexible or customizable. In addition, they don't come with back end support and you don't have an affiliate network to draw from because your affiliate program is only as good as the affiliates who support you. Hence, you need to find these affiliates and the only way to find them is to recruit them. The network does a lot of recruiting for you through newsletters they send out to their affiliate subscribers, they spotlight you and they have a lot more influence as far as getting you better relationships. They'll also have some of the top end affiliates.

If you are working with a company like KowaBunga, we'll find, in our own database and outside of it, companies and people that will be willing to work for you. We'll find you that top end performing affiliate which will be a very good match. Since companies such as KowaBunga have this whole network in place, it makes it easier for you to move forward.

However, if you're buying software on your own, you're literally on your own and you'll have to run your affiliate program yourself. You'll have to recruit affiliates. You'll have to devote 40 to 50 hours a month to get a program going. You'll not only need to e mail affiliate, you'll also have to call them, talk to them and build a relationship with them.

Affiliate Network Programs charge the merchant a fee. The fee varies from program to program and depends on the agreement you've signed with the program. Sometimes the fee is commission based. At other times it is based on the number of affiliates and how much they are producing for the merchant. It can be a percentage of the profits earned through these affiliates. Some of them are free for the merchant to join just because they use they use the software, but a fee can be charged just for having a listing in the network.

The affiliates are lucky because these programs don't charge them anything. The affiliate is their acquisition. Merchants can have their own software and you don't have to use a network. If you are planning to have a small program in which you'll only have a relationship with 10 to12 other affiliates who will be marketing your product, you may not need to invest in large scale software or anything customized. You'll have to scale it for yourself and when you're ready to scale up higher you have the option of migrating everything over to a company like KowaBunga.

However, certain affiliate network companies have a set way of doing their software so you'll have to conform to them. Watch out for such problems. When looking for a network, check what kind of affiliates are in the network, what are the long term costs and how much money do they have to put in the escot account.

As a merchant you need to find out what kind of relationship you'll have with the network, what sort of support they'll give you and whether they are the going to help you with the creative and conversions etc. Find out how much they are going to invest in you to make sure that your affiliate program can produce. That is really important.

There are a number of merchants that are members of a number of networks and offer different commission rates on different networks. So as an affiliate, you need to fish for the best commission rates.

Some networks are less expensive for merchants and they can produce better. However, if a network is not doing that well, you may still not want to leave it because you'll lose all your affiliates on that network as you have no control over them. The question is who really owns the affiliates, is it you or the network? Can you readily email your affiliates? Can you get their information? What are you allowed to have?

At KowaBunga, you actually own the affiliate relationships. They are your affiliates, not KowaBunga's affiliates. However, with other big networks, you don't own the affiliate relationship and you cannot contact them. KowaBunga offers a huge advantage to merchants because the affiliates are your business assets. They are your business partners and you can talk to them directly.

If you are going to send out an e mail campaign and you don't have direct relationships, you'll have to go through the network and they'll send it to the affiliate for you. For example, during Katrina, Oryx's entire business was washed away and they couldn't service any customers. However, their affiliates kept sending Orex hits and traffic through Commission Junction. Orex could not reach out and tell their affiliates to stop sending this traffic.

According to the Commission Junction agreement, Orex had to pay for what the affiliate sends you, how many affiliates you have and how much traffic they are sending you. Since Orex could not contact their affiliates and tell them to stop, they had to pay Commission Junction's fee. So make sure you have access to your affiliates and can contact them yourself.

However, the great benefit that affiliates gain from using the networks is that they get to see a lot more statistics. They can see an active rating going on of other affiliates for those programs. In most networks, merchants are required to put a certain amount of money in an escot account, so they merchants can't get away without paying you.

The networks also provide more tools for the affiliates to use. The network is designed to benefit the affiliate because a network always wants to have the most affiliates because that is how they attract merchants to come in and use them.

Ginette has a passion for affiliate marketing because it allows her to work from home and build a lot of lasting relationships since 1993 onwards. You can contact Ginette through KowaBunga or at Search Engine Workshops. She deals with clients on case by case bases and advises affiliates. Ginette also does chats for Search Engine Workshops Resource Center in which you can ask her questions about Search Engine marketing and affiliate marketing.