Six Figure Affiliate Blogging, Is it really Possible?
If you’re here with me for quite sometime, you would definitely notice that I am talking affiliate marketing mostly from the paid search and advertising point of view. Just alone by reading the noobs guide, you’d find out that the affiliate model we are running with here in AffiliateHat is CPA to paid traffic model.
It surprises me though on how affiliate marketing is so diversified. I mean as shoemoney stated there are six figure affiliates who haven’t heard of performance-based networks like AzoogleAds, Copeac, Neverblue and etc. That alone sums up that within affiliate marketing alone, there are several income streams all with very good potential.
Anyways, I was recently pinged by Zac Johnson about his free eBook on affiliate marketing. It’s not really an affiliate marketing guide like the ones we have here in our newsletter but its more of an affiliate monetization way from the blogging side. Just in case you don’t know, Zac Johnson is a self-proclaimed super affiliate slash spiderman fan slash blogger. He was really used to get criticisms a lot from the paid search industry for being fake or what not but I guess that’s a thing of the past as he was able to carve out a powerful brand around himself by now.
The eBook that he had is entitled Six Figure Affiliate Blogging. The free product tackles some fundamental topics like finding a niche, doing keyword research, getting some nice and hardcore blog designs. That is the basic part of it. However, there are some pretty nice writeup on the book on how he, himself turned the blog into an affiliate income earner machine so if you’re already a tech savvy, you may want to skip the fundamental part and jump straight into the advanced chapters.
Even though I am pretty allergic with eBooks, I liked reading it in the end. Zac is probably one of the best bloggers in terms of making so much money turning his readers into affiliate commissions and as far as what I’m observing right now that seems to be an untapped source of blog income. People are so “advertising” obsessive that they dont really leverage their traffic by doing much more.
So definitely if you’re interested into this, you may want to check out his six figure affiliate blogging product. And besides its free so if you dont want it, just delete in from your hard drive and make a blog post that it sucks. 
Following Hot Trends is the Easiest Way to Make Money
In my last post entitled there’s no best product to promote in affiliate marketing, I explained why there really is no product that can make you tons of money that easy. I emphasized the essence of testing and tweaking in affiliate marketing and how it can literally make or break your business. For today, I would like to contradict that thought a bit by talking about profiting from the latest trends.
What is a hot trend? Ok I will not quote a definition from some stupid ass resource site. Hot trends are simply the ones that are being talked about a lot (yes it speaks volume) and that people are willing to spend for it. In short, if an anime is getting a lot of buzz it doesn’t really mean it’s automatically profitable.
Some Good example of Hot trends
One good example is the recent buzz around Apple’s iPad. Because Apple finally released some info about it, it opened a profitable market for people, what is it? Email Submits! Just by surfing through PeerFly, I easily noticed an offer paying $1.20 per lead (email only) with a VERY high conversion rate of 40% (it obviously went down afterwards).
Another good example a long time ago is the Obama, McCain related offers. During the presidential campaigns, a lot of merchants and affiliate alike are cashing in through this trend simply because it was the “in” thing.
You may probably be thinking about saturation and stuffs but remember saturation and competition is good because it signifies there’s a money in that market. More competition means more money.
How to Find the Hot Trends
People do it differently and I’m amazed on how a lot of marketers get creative with this. But for the blog’s audience and nature I will discuss the basic ways.
Twitter is the top social media tool and just by searching for surging topics that are lasting a bit longer, you can already have your offers to promote. What I usually do is go to sites like TweetMeme and find the hottest post. After that I’ll match that with a certain offer.
Google Trends
Google Trends is the best tool for finding the latest buzz search-wise. There’s a good comprehensive post on how to maximize the use of this tool located here.
Blog-Hopping
It does make sense actually to explore the big sites in the blogosphere to find what’s hot. I usually browse big and authority sites like TechCrunch, Mashable and etc to find out what’s kicking in.
How about you? Do you care about hot trends when doing your own affiliate marketing stuffs? Let me know!
Simple Secret in Making Money from Facebook
Ok sorry for being hysterical in the title. By now you should already know that there is no such thing as secret in affiliate marketing. Or to be more specific, a secret that would literally explode your profits. Again affiliate marketing is all about testing and tweaking and the more you learn from your data, the more you will earn.
Before, it’s very easy to profit from Facebook. All you need to do is run that shady email submit and get it in front of as many as audience as possible. Time flies very fast and now with all those new terms, a lot of people find making money from Facebook impossible.
If you get lazy to do a good ad copy, most of the times it will just get rejected. Even if you do a good copy, sometimes it will get rejected even. The key there is by getting into the smallest niche or what is called microniches.
A good example. If you’re going to run a quiz offer where you are going to target literally everyone, target the tag entertainment and have as much people see the ad, are you going to make money? I doubt!
There’s no secret but here’s one thing you’ve got to bare in mind. When you promote something on Facebook, make sure you laser target your audience according to the offer you’re promoting. For instance, if you’re promoting the Avatar Quiz Offer, then target not just the Avatar movie avid fans. Target them by age, whether they’re single or not and stuffs. Do you think a 40 yr.old woman would be interested to take that quiz? I bet not! Or will an 11 year old devoted fan have the money to pay for the subscription? Naah!
At the end of the day, it’s just about simply trying to get as deep as possible. While you may get lesser impressions by doing this, it may literally double your EPC. What are you gonna do with 10 mil impressions and no leads? and on the flip side, how about 10000 impressions and 10 leads? Remember, the more your ad is clicked, the more it will be displayed. And the bottom line is that the cost per click would be much cheaper if you’re ad is getting clicked often.
What say you?
What is the Best Product to Promote?
In wickedfire, most of the question is about what is the best product to be an affiliate for? What is the best product to promote? The cliche answer/s is either it depends or there’s no best product to promote. So today I’ll explain a bit what it means and why. Let’s now dissect it.
It depends
People normally base it on the per lead tag, epc, and stuffs. For example two years ago, the ringtone market is a hot commodity. Everyone is in there, everyone’s like making money with it. The truth is only few did. While ringtone is a lucrative niche, the problem is its saturated. To be able to get a position in Adwords or YSM you need to shred out a lot of cash since the cpc is absurdly high.
Last year’s flavor is the rebill offers. If you don’t know, rebills are the ones that the customer just need to pay less than $5 for shipping YET they don’t know its a recurring payment. It’s shady but its how it was really designed. Like ringtones, it’s high paying but I doubt a lot of people made huge money with it. Researching, its obvious that the same and the same people are the ones that make the most of it.
So in the end it depends not just on the price per lead or the rising trends, but also on how suitable it is for your budget.
There’s No Best Product
This is true if you ask me. Every time I log in to my Copeac account, I always see the hot offers and stuffs but I rarely promote those. Sometimes you’d be surprised on how some of the offers work, what’s converting and why its converting.
For instance, I would like to promote a quiz offer which is working in UK. It converts well simply because Im promoting on a different demographic. Maybe not a lot of people promote that offer or promote it in that geographical location.
The thing is you can follow what others do by promoting those hot campaigns and yet still fail badly or promote something unknown, lose money, then capitalize in the end.
Affiliate Marketing is a testing and tweaking business (and spending too). Even the highest converting products will suck if you do your campaigns poorly. And besides if there’s such a best product to promote, why would I tell it to you anyway?
Incentivizing In Affiliate Marketing
Incentivizing in affiliate marketing also known as incentive marketing is a very popular marketing tactic which is done mostly by website owners that have a huge audience. Because of its nature, it’s not too hard to thrive and make some reasonable income doing it.
How it is done
Here’s a good example. Thesis theme is probably the hottest WordPress theme for the last 8 months and because of it, a lot of its affiliates are really doing well with it. So to incentivize Thesis, most people are offering what we call cash back. Thesis offers affiliates a 40% commission for every sale made and what wise affiliates do is share the commission with everyone who will buy under them. And therefore doing the math, instead of earning $35 per sale, the affiliate would make less because he’s going to give some cash back ($10-$15), YET can possibly quadruple his customers. Who wouldn’t want a discount anyways?
There are a lot of other ways to do this like adding something to the package, or giving a premium something as a bundle and many more.
Before doing this and conclusion
First and foremost, make sure the offer is incentivizable. If it’s not then obviously you will just be wasting your time doing it.
Second, make sure you have a good number of audiences and a tight community. You cannot just start a website and then have people believe you that you are really offering cash back. Reputation counts so if you already have an established website then it’s a big plus factor.
Lastly, communicate well with the merchant. Because of its nature, some will abuse it. You definitely don’t want to give some cash to people who really don’t purchase under you. Have a constant communication with the merchant to make sure everything is running well.
Overall, this is a pretty good tactic. A lot of people are doing it but not a lot of them are being successful. Getting the process implemented properly and good communication with the merchant are the only things you need to get this thing working well. Good luck and tell me your own opinion.
