Been a long time AffiliateHat readers!

I’ve been constantly bombarded with emails telling me to make my affiliate marketing basic page a more “noob” friendly. Initially I was pissed off, but then I realized that ‘hey, Im not my audience”. Because you are loyal reader for this site and because I care for you, I would revise that page. So expect that page to be more friendly to newcomers by late next week.

Anyhow, uberaff recently released probably a comprehensive YET latest guide for affiliate marketing covering a wide array of readers. Whether you are a beginner, an intermediate or an “expert” you should give these resource a look. Anyway credit link goes to uberaffiliate.com

Nickycakes Newbie Guide
Free Affiliate Marketing Guide
Landing Pages And The Urgency Of Time
Mad lib form style testing results
Photoshop Guide For Affiliates
Landing Page Rotation Script
6 Seductive CTR Tips
Tuesday Tips – Improving Landing Page CTR
The 1 Penny Tip
Top 100 TrafficVance Targets
TrafficVance – Demographics & Tips
PPV Network Reviews
A Simple Way to Split Test PPV Landing Pages Without a Rotator
3 Ways to Increase Your PPV Landing Page CTR
Laser Targeting Your PPV Campaigns
Media Buying 101: Introduction To Inventory (A Step-By-Step Guide) – Part 1
Tips on Media Buying
Optimizing Google Content Campaigns
Google content network basic strategy
The Beginners Guide To Advertising On Facebook
Plenty of Fish. Plenty of Money.
Free Geo IP Javascript To Increase Conversions On Your Campaigns
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 1 – Intro & Tools
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 2 – URLs, URL Variables, and using Live HTTP Headers
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 3 – Basics of Assessing Your Target
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 4 – cURL
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 5 – A Basic Scraper
Monetizing International Traffic
Becoming An Advertiser : Part 1 (Overview)
CS1.1 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 1
CS1.2 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 2 – Keyword Research
CS1.3 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 3 – Landing Pages and Tracking
CS1.4 – PPC Case Study Part 4 – Advice, Tips and Campaign Structure
CS1.5 – PPC Case Study Part 5 – Campaign Update and a Top Secret Tool
CS1.6 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 6 – Stats Recap and Going Forward
How I Generated $1,700,000 in Auto Sales Despite a Weak Economy
Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Results
How I made $7,144.00 using TrafficVance.
NEW Facebook Ads
Plentyoffish Self Serve Advertising.
How to Build a Profitable Campaign on a Limited Budget
Impress Your Visitors with a Graphically Dynamic Landing Page
Conquering The Google Content Network

Pick what you need and focus. Remember, there’s no information overload, only filter failure.

Most of the newbie question in affiliate marketing is about how to promote their own affiliate offer? I usually respond by giving them some short list of different tactics and strategies that I use in my own campaigns.

If you look at the Affiliate Marketing Basics Page here, the no.7 step is promoting. It’s kinda vague to think about it since promoting affiliate offers is a wide topic. That’s why there has never been a scarcity of this topic online. Affiliate bloggers never run out of posts in tackling this and it’s a continuous debate over and over.

It’s limitless because for instance, when you talk about pay-per click marketing, you can talk about several variations on how to do it effectively. You can also include copywriting inside it where there are another heap of variations. And we’re not even into different PPC networks yet and their differences in their own rules.

Overwhelmed by now? It’s normal. In the next few days I’m going to carve out a post about a huge list of different ways on promoting your affiliate offers and in each ways, I would try to be as comprehensive as possible. Stay tuned.

(Sorry for leaving you hanging)

In affiliate marketing, you can easily distinguish the experts from the noobs. Most newbies don’t do tracking. In fact and surprisingly, they don’t even seem to know how to track and don’t show any interests in tracking. Probably one of the many reasons why most “affiliate marketers” doesn’t really make money with affiliate marketing.

Tracking is essential, just like testing and tweaking, it helps us do well and improve our own campaigns. By tracking, we come to have an idea of what is working and what’s not working w/c will then give us the opportunity to tweak.

There are several tools that you can use to track your own affiliate marketing campaigns but you don’t need to use a lot. If you are with Pay-per click networks like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search and MSN Ad Center, you can already have that built-in tracking with them because they have the data, although only basic tracking.

You can also make good use of Google Analytics if you have landing page for the product that you intend to build in for long term. Besides being free, you also get to enjoy all the add-on tools that the Analytics provide.

Lastly, there is an awesome service known as Tracking202. It’s amazingly free and it’s a very reliable service that can pretty much do advance tracking for your campaigns. You can either opt to use the free hosted version or the premium self-hosted version (needs a dedicated server). Unlike analytics, tracking202 is nearly real-time with its flawless tracking and I don’t know any other program that does tracking superbly combined with reliability and affordable cost than the 202 product. It’s also fully integrated with the major pay-per click networks so you’ll not have any issue with it.

Not tracking is a murderous crime in affiliate marketing. Do not think I am over-exaggerating things here. If you’re not tracking your campaigns yet then start doing so now, and you will be ahead of many other marketers. What say you?

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

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!

You probably have noticed right now that there is that ugly eBook located at the header of this site. That is actually the free stuff given if you subscribe to AffiliateHat Dot Com’s newsletter.  You get the info product for free, plus you are subscribed to the weekly newsletter which will give out awesome tips that will accelerate your learning on affiliate marketing. Do take note that the newsletter contents are the ones that are not published (and will never be published) in this blog.

What is Affiliate Marketing Manifesto?

Affiliate Marketing Manifesto is like a general guide in affiliate marketing which is newbie-friendly. The book is written with the audience in mind so if you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing then you are probably the best person for this. It’s 25-page eBook which hands out no fluff, all pure meat content.

This is what is inside the Manifesto:

• Affiliate Marketing Introduced

• The 3 Things All Affiliate Marketers Need To Survive Online

• How To Become A Super Affiliate In Niche Markets

• So Many Affiliate Programs! Which One Do I Choose?

• Which Affiliate Networks To Look Out For When Promoting

• Easy Profits Using PPC In Your Affiliate Marketing Business

• Using Product Recommendations To Increase Your Bottom Line

• Using Camtasia to Increase Your Affiliate Checks

• Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

• How To Avoid The 3 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes

Go now and make sure to grab your copy of affiliate marketing manifesto located at the topmost part of the page.

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?

]]> http://www.affiliatehat.com/what-is-the-best-product-to-promote/feed/ 6 http://www.affiliatehat.com/key-tip-for-online-success-stop-reading-blogs/ http://www.affiliatehat.com/key-tip-for-online-success-stop-reading-blogs/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:51:06 +0000 affiliatehat http://www.affiliatehat.com/?p=148

The one main advantage of blogs is that it’s easy to love reading it. Because of it’s intrinsic nature, most people prefer reading blogs rather than the traditional media, newspaper, news sites and etc. Since bloggers are friendly and do prefer to interact…

The one main advantage of blogs is that it’s easy to love reading it. Because of it’s intrinsic nature, most people prefer reading blogs rather than the traditional media, newspaper, news sites and etc. Since bloggers are friendly and do prefer to interact with people, a lot of us have just put reading as one of our daily habits.

If you’re reading this article, you probably have heard this tip a lot of times. Stop reading and start implementing. But you’re reading this blog now which means you’re doing the wrong thing? Probably yes or probably no.

If you notice, the people who are telling you that tip are the same people known as bloggers. And bloggers are the ones who produce content and drive as much people as they can to read and read and read. So how is that?

The truth is they don’t really want you not to read their blog anymore, what they want is for you to read their blog and dismiss all the other ones. Sounds bad but that’s the case. YET if you follow that tip, it would benefit you A LOT!

Stopping reading blogs is not really about not reading at all, it’s about lessening your consumption. The problem with most people who love reading is that they consume and consume and consume until they forgot and forgot all the stuffs they’ve read. In whatever business you are, it’s not really them who will move your business, its YOU. So stop blog hopping, stop exploring the blogosphere, stop subscribing to them and start doing your own thing whether it’s affiliate marketing or whatever.

Reading 2-3 blogs a day is good but if reading and reading has become a habit of yours that it starts to hurt your productivity then quit on reading.

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Today I am going to make a really quick post about picking an affiliate offer/s to promote. So assuming you have now completely understood the whole affiliate marketing concept and already signed up w/an affiliate network, we are now going to pick an offer.

So picking an affiliate offer to promote doesn’t really take a lot of efforts. Although some people would suggest you to do some research to find out what is hot and what is not, that is not really necessary. The best way to find out is by actually implementing so you could make a brief test if the offer is worth promoting or not.

Does that mean you have to lose money first? Definitely not! To help you make the decision is your beloved affiliate manager. Who the heck is he/she? Aff.manager is the one who holds you and communicates with you. It’s very important to develop a close relationship with him/her. So right after you signed up w/a network you can immediately shoot her an email asking for some top converting offers and how it is promoted. That way you are getting ahead way of everyone who’s not communicating with their manager.

If you already decided on an offer to promote you need to pay closely at the requirements and descriptions. In that certain page you can see where the offers are accepted (geographically), accepted ways of promoting it and the earningsperclick and etc.. Not following the requirements would give you a lot of headache as you’d just be wasting your time and money promoting an offer.

That’s it, questions are very much entertained…

Heya Melvin here.

From the last post we have defined and learned what is an affiliate link. Today we are going to discuss cloaking and redirecting links. Just a short question why do we actually need to cloak/mask/redirect links? Well as generations evolved and web surfers/buyers have become more ‘techy’, they have become more knowledgeable about affiliate links. If you have an affiliate link that looks like this ‘http://teethwhitener.com/?ref=googleguy’, it’s pretty obvious for them that the latter part is the referral key so its more likely that they would remove it.

Although these day affiliate companies have provided more solid-looking links and one which couldn’t easily be determined. Because of it the need for cloaking and masking has become less valuable. But still here we are going to tackle three different techniques.

Affiliate Masking – is simply making an affiliate link look like its not. It’s the most basic strategy and it happens at the status bar. In our example below, you can see that when you hover your mouse on the link it puts a different name/url. It can be done using javascript with the following code:

<a href=“http://www.true.com/?affiliate=affhat” onmouseover=” window.status=’true.com’; return true” onmouseout=“window.status=”; return true”>True Dating Program</a>

Link Redirection(most used) – is just simply making a link redirect or jump to the affiliate link itself. There are actually a lot of ways on doing it. There are also some thirdparty softwares that could get the job done for you for a very cheap price. Anyway here’s how to do it through PHP:

1. <?php
2. $urls = array (
3. ‘neverblue’ => ‘http://c.azjmp.com/az/ch.php?f=1700&i=12&sub=affiliatecode’,
4. ‘copeac’ => ‘http://rapidresponse.directtrack.com/index.html?super_affiliate_code=affilaitecode’
5. );
6. header (‘Location: ‘ . $urls[$_REQUEST['go']]);
7. ?>

Cloaking URL (advanced) – There are so many webmaster blogs that call link cloaking as link redirecting and its retarded. Anyway link cloaking is simply just using user agents to show different stuffs to bots and humans. This is done by some affiliates to avoid hurting their organic rankings and keep them ahead of most sites and also to have better rankings. This is also regarded as blackhat but I believe it’s not (if you’re not caught).

So those are different ways on ‘hiding’ your link as an affiliate link. I would very well suggest to just use link redirection for newbies as it doesn’t really take much to do it. Also, it’s been the most widely used tactic in the industry. If you have some questions or concerns, use the comment form below.

So we have just learned that affiliate marketing is basically selling other people’s product and getting an affiliate commission in return. The question is how the heck do these networks know that it’s me that sold the product and not the other affiliates? The answer is it could be determined through your affiliate links.

Affiliate links are simply unique links which determines whether the certain product being promoted is under you or others. What’s the difference of affiliate links from normal links? Take a look:

http://teethwhitening.com/?213123 or http://affiliates.network.com/9689

http://teethwhitening.com/

It’s easy to notice that the first and second url is the affiliate link. The text highlighted in red is the unique number for each affiliates. Of course it varies depending on affiliate network and cloaking links which we will discuss in future posts. You can also see in the other link that it’s a little different from the first. Why? As time passes by, affiliate networks has largely evolved. The second link is just a ‘jump link’ which when clicked, would  also go directly to the first link. This has been done so affiliates could have better conversions and for the networks to have easier time in tracking. With that unique referral key, affiliate networks could easily track details such as clicks, impressions, conversions and etc. The third link, on the other hand is the direct link of the merchant. If someone purchases under that link, the merchant would get 100% of the revenue since it’s not an affiliate link

Just remember not to forget embedding your referral link to your landing page instead of just the direct link or you’ll just be wasting your time. In our future posts, we would be tackling ways on how to hide and cloak links for better conversions, so stay tuned!