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A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

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Affiliate Marketing

Studying How Internet Marketers Roll with Launches

Studying How Internet Marketers Roll with Launches

by Melvin · Mar 12, 2011

If you’ve been following our industry lately, you probably have noticed the buzz around this thing called the Software System. I didn’t buy it nor am I against it. And in fact, I’m not here to review it or give my take on it. The reason why I opened that up is to study how internet marketers act or roll with these big-time launches by their industry friends and business partners.

It’s All About Affiliate Marketing

A long time ago, I wrote a post called Affiliate Marketing in blogs where I discussed that unlike in PPC-CPA space, affiliate marketing in blogs is all about building relationships and recommending products that are really really congruent not just with the market, but with their specific needs.

So for example, you can’t just promote a product about making money online in a making money online market. You have to dig deeper into that and find their inner needs. Is it making money through memberships? or about blogging? product launches? This just doesn’t apply to blogs, it applies to people with lists as well.

As you can see, you will get nowhere when you don’t identify the inner needs and desire of your market. With this, you really really have to be specific with your offer.

The Software System Launch

First and foremost, I would like to give this disclaimer that I’m not a product launch guru. I really am not that’s why I constantly watch and study different things. What I’m going to outline here is just all my 2 cents.

Obviously the software system isn’t your typical “make money on the internet” kind of hype. It focuses on creating softwares and selling them to a bunch of people and making tons of money. During that launch guys like John Chow, Jeremy Schoemoney, Jeff Walker, Frank Kern and a bunch of smaller marketers and bloggers jumped on the bandwagon and promoted it. For this post, I would be using the big 4 mentioned above.

During the period, these guys were emailing people like crazy and for almost everyday (twice a day for Kern for instance). Now let’s (briefly) take a look at some of their emails during the launch day:

John Chow’s Offer:

Jeff Walker’s offer:

Shoe’s offer:

Kern’s offer:

Noticed the same patterns in their emails on that launch day? Hmm, interesting…

Incentivization – the art of bribing

As funny as it may sound, all of them (and some more others) have this kind of a bribe to further more try to convince their readers to purchase UNDER their link. And all of them are claiming that by spending $2700 on that product, they would get over that price value in return. How unreal could that possibly be? Can I buy a Kia and get an Audi in return?

I know it sounds crazy but incentivization is a big part in launches and also a big reason why marketers (both the owner and the affiliate) make so much money. The incent value that they’re giving away is just the “perceived value”, not the real price tag but since a lot of smart marketers have built good communities around them, most people trust them and believe that they’re really getting a good value for the amount they’re spending (w/c maybe is true or maybe not).

So I think that’s the important thing to learn here. People’s averseness (means resisting) to buy something online these days makes it much harder for us, marketers to go out and sell our own stuff w/o giving away a lot in return. It also speaks on how crucial relationship building is in this type of business since people obviously won’t buy from you and anything you recommend, unless they trust you and see you as a prominent person in your market.

This trend started a long time ago and I believe it would only continue for a very long period of time. As an internet marketer and/or blogger, are you in this game too?

 

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, Monetization Tactics Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, incentivization, product launch

How to be Great at Your Affiliate Business with Content

How to be Great at Your Affiliate Business with Content

by Melvin · Aug 19, 2010

In this guest post, Corry Cummings discussed the role of high quality content in succeeding with affiliate marketing.

If you are familiar with running an affiliate business, you know how important promotion is. You must promote your business partner’s product in order to be successful. The factor that determines whether or not your business generates profit is whether you can get the visitors to your website interested in the product. One of the best ways to do this is with high quality content. You must make sure that your content is professional, clean and attention-grabbing. If you can manage this, your website will garner attention, gain credibility and most importantly, be interesting to your visitors. Here are some suggestions for how to become great at your affiliate business with content.

Choose the Right Type of Content

Different business plans will necessitate various kinds of content. Think about the direction that you want to take your business in and the type of content you think will appeal to your readers. Every business will have different needs, but the kind of content that tends to work best for affiliate businesses include the following:

  • Blog Posts
  • Reports
  • Articles
  • E-Books

It may be helpful to mix and match in order to appeal to a variety of people. Consider your product when deciding what kind of content to use. Is it a relatively uniform demographic or are you writing to people of multiple ages or different countries of residence? Think about the needs and desires of your readers. If you can satisfy those needs and desires, your readers will be more willing to explore the product further.

Choose Your Topics Carefully

Just like choosing the form your content will take, it is important to carefully plan your topics. You will want to feature content that is varied but can all relate to your topic. Do not just ceaselessly promote your product. In general, customers will be put off by obvious advertisement. Instead, you will want to get them legitimately interested in the product. Provide content that discusses the history or simple facts about the product. Keep in mind that you are still trying to sell a product, but approaching that goal from multiple angles might increase your chance of success. Again, consider your audience and choose topics based on what you think they will want.

Provide High Quality Content

Having a variety of content with multiple forms and topics can help draw interest to your business, but only if the content is high quality. This is perhaps the most important step. If your content is poorly written or simply uninteresting, it will not matter what the topic is. The visitors to your website will associate shoddy writing with an unreliable seller and a substandard product. One recommendation is that you consider hiring a content writing service. This way, you will be guaranteed high quality content from professional content writers. You will still have control over exactly what you want from each article, and you can be confident that the end result will be clean, professional and interesting to your visitors.

Corry Cummings is the owner of Content Customs, a content creation company that specializes in high quality web content writing services. He also runs a blog over at Content Customs, which is managed and written by one of the head writers of the company.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing Tagged With: affiliate business, Affiliate Marketing

How MelvinBlog Dot Com Really Makes Money

How MelvinBlog Dot Com Really Makes Money

by Melvin · May 10, 2010

make money from blogI got this request from two people and although they are only two people (lols), I thought I would share here with you right now how MelvinBlog Dot Com makes money.

First and foremost, I would first like to clarify that this blog makes very little to no money at all. Initially when I started this blog, I had in mind bloggers like Shoemoney and Carl Ocab and basically told myself that I’m really going to monetize this blog as hard as I could. Eventually it did especially the past few years where it makes a steady three-figure income every month which I thought was amazing considering I’m not really selling anything except ad space and also the fact that the blog isn’t a high traffic one.

Anyways enough schmoozing, today I am going to break down to you how this blog makes money in the past recent years. I may not totally give you the exact figures or the precise time period but I’d try to detail it as possible.

This blog is nowhere close to a high-traffic site but it’s enough for me to make some money out of it and take good care of all the bills. I also think it’s interesting to let people see how this blog makes money considering a lot of blogs who have much bigger traffic than this blog has been having difficulties with monetization. Without further ado, here we go.

Direct Advertising

blog advertising

It’s no secret and by simple observation you can easily see that majority of the money from this blog comes from selling ad spaces directly to advertisers. I sell several advertising which includes the well-known square banners at the sidebar, I also have text links and the premium spot which is the 468X60 banner space. Initially I wasn’t too keen on selling paid reviews but after realizing it’s totally just fine, I decided to give it a go.

I don’t know but I think I really do well with selling my ad spaces in this blog. I usually get sold out and if not, maybe 1-2 ad spaces were left. One reason is that my ad space is really cheap. I know some bloggers who have the same traffic than me yet they’re selling their spaces for like double of my amount. I’ve talked about it in my how to get that blog advertisers post and it’s all about really letting the marketplace decide for the price tag. Getting 4 $10 placement is always better than one $25 placement.

I’m also keen on giving out discounts especially if it’s on a commitment basis or if it’s a bulk package. Not only I get to be able to get sponsors but also it builds that publisher-advertiser relationship over time which is something that most bloggers don’t do.

And lastly yes I use a very awesome plugin called OIO Publisher. For those who do not know, what it basically does is make selling ad space automated. The advertiser purchases an ad, and then the plugin does everything. You don’t need to upload the banner manually, you don’t need to undergo to those long processes that you usually go into when doing it by yourself.

It also does have some other unique features like geo-targeting and stat-tracking in which it emails the advertisers about all the stats, the clicks, ecpm, and all those geeky number stuffs.

If you don’t have it yet, get your copy now. I know I was like having some pride into myself before and said “I’m not gonna jump into this OIO thing.” I was making good money then but upon purchasing, I almost doubled my advertising income alone because of this plugin. $47 is so cheap since you can use it in as many of your sites as possible.

Direct Ad Sales alone pays for my virtual private network hosting bills and some other couple of outsourcing works so maybe it’s not that dead after all.

Affiliate Marketing

affiliate marketing money

Most of you here know that I’m an affiliate marketer primarily running CPA campaigns through Pay-per click and then Facebook so being an affiliate is usually my bread and butter in terms of making money. But then it’s not really something that is related to this blog so I really don’t count it as part of the revenue.

However, I made some money though with some affiliate products I recommend in this blog. On my earlier days I was promoting affiliate networks like Pepperjam Network and Clickbooth which back then was paying $5 and $10 respectively for every referral. I made a lot of money in that since I leveraged the blog’s traffic and my reputation in forums. Do take note that I was making money as well by promoting affiliate offers within the network so I was not just trying to refer people for the sake of making money.

Most commissions nowadays are from the products that I’ve used and recommend here in this blog. Some of them include the 31 day workbook by Darren Rowse, Elegant Themes, Theme Wars, and of course OIO affiliate program which is one of the lucrative programs out there. Again, I promote products that I use and recommend. I would say stay away from promoting stuffs that you haven’t used yourself.

Affiliate program isn’t really the main driving force of this blog but I know some blogs who do really quite well with this business model. One of them is Michael Dunlop of IncomeDiary.com who doesn’t sell ad space. Instead he leverages his traffic by providing tons of free good stuffs and then recommending products to them afterwards. It’s a great business model as well for the blog so you might as well look at that.

Selling my product

selling own products

If you can remember I sold a product last year which was called “Make Money Online Blog Monetizer” in which it was my first info product ever. The product was launched for 2 and a half months before pulling it out in the market. I’m not gonna say it’s the best product ever since sliced bread but it did almost raked in a thousand dollars in that period. I know I could’ve done much better had the internship not started killing me back then.

Since then I closed the product down as my goal was really to test the market back then as well as analyze its scalability. Whether I had made $20, $200 or $2000, I would still close the launch for that thing for the same duration of time. Whether it is still going to get launched again or not remains to be seen though.

In the latter part of this year I am looking to release another product so stay tuned for that.

Unorthodox Monetization Ways

unorthodox monetization

I always take blog monetization as a big challenge so I did some unorthodox ways to squeeze money from this blog as well.  One of them is through the “put the banner and make money program”. During the past couple of years it was really kicking. I mean you don’t need traffic, don’t need page rank, all you need is to sign up, and then put those ugly looking banners that are made of frames and tables and then receive your 10 Euros (they were usually paying Euros). Some are on a recurring basis and most are on a one time basis.

I really didn’t get the other side of it, all I knew was it’s another way to make money. I even wrote a post about it on how you can money without any sweat at all.

I also did some paid text links in posts thing where I basically was approached by advertisers saying they want this keyword in this specific post to link on their site or whatnot. Probably it’s an evil tactic but is definitely another good way to make money. The buy sell text links forum in digital point was where I was getting most of my clients.

Finally I also tried my luck with CPM-based advertising where I get paid a dollar or more for a thousand impressions. I was a smart ass so all I did was to leverage social media traffic, setup some rotating IP addresses to view my blog and buy cheap traffic. It was a little profitable thing but then I stopped doing it when I switched with this magazine template.

I still have a couple at the back of my mind but I don’t think it’s good to share those things as well as it may probably harm your blog if you implement it. Anyways do take note too that this is what I’d like to call as “desperate monetization measures”. Like I’ve said, it’s always a challenge for me to make money and so even when people see me as trying too hard to make money, I really don’t mind.

Future Plan

As I’ve said I’m going to release a couple of products down the road this year and test the market for it. Since I started list-building last year, I would try to get something from it as well, try to build relationships and then leverage it by recommending some stuffs to them.

The direct advertising model is going to be here in my blog for at least this year since its making me some really good money although I would try to shy away from it probably starting next year once I start getting a more consistent stream of income from other sources

An interesting note to take as well is on how I myself have turned the focus of this blog from making as much money as possible to actually starting to work more on its personal brand and focusing with relationships instead. Although the blog still makes decent money, most of the goals that I’ve set this year aren’t really on the financial side, rather more on building a larger community towards it and bigger readability all throughout the blogosphere. Money is good, but I’d take growing credibility and expertise any time of the day.

Long post huh? What say you?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, Monetization Tactics, Money magnets, Preachings, Q & A, Ramblings Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, blog income, Direct Ad Sales, make money online, melvinblog, product sales

Affiliate Marketing in Blogs

by Melvin · Sep 16, 2009

It’s been quite a long time since I wrote something on a topic that is my favorite, talking about affiliate marketing. It happened so because of me acquiring and managing AffiliateHat.com and transferring all of affiliate marketing related stuffs to that blog and focusing more on general marketing and blogging tips here in this blog. But anyway today I would like to talk about a simple affiliate marketing topic w/c is about promoting offers in blogs.

Most people make the mistake of thinking affiliate marketing in blogs is just like affiliate marketing as a whole. Totally false. In promoting in blogs, you are more toned down, laid back and careful. When you use a blog, in most cases a make money online blog, you risk your reputation, unlike in the traditional, landing page–pay per click combination wherein people would not even know (or care) your true name and personality.

Another is when promoting outside the blog, the tactic tends to be more of hardselling whereas in blog, you’d more likely have to be transparent and honest to your readers.

Last year I made a post about why some bloggers make so much w/affiliate referrals and I got a lot of responses about it. The truth is, your conversion rate would depend on how reputed you are in your industry. I see a lot of big bloggers promoting shit products and I doubt that they don’t make any money with it. Why? Because they are famous!

Another big factor is how you write your reviews. Obviously, the only good way to promote something in your blog is through product reviews. Again most people do wrong with it by stuffing their readers too much to buy the product, making it obvious that they are being biased. What happens then is that readers get annoyed and leave.

You see, things are about different when you do use your blog as a marketing tool for affiliate offers.  If you are looking out to use your blog as a tool for affiliate promotions, make sure you’re not doing it wrong, or maybe you should rethink of the strategies that you would use. Remember, it takes a  lot of time to build a reputation online. But it only takes a while for you to completely ruin it.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate marketing blogs, blog promotion

Promoting Email Submits? Don’t!

by Melvin · Apr 28, 2009

affiliate fraud Pictures, Images and Photos

When every newcomer enters the world of affiliate marketing, he’s normally advised to try out the low-risk email submit types of offers. Why not, I mean email submits are pretty easy to convert. All you need to get a lead is an email of a customer. Also you don’t need to compete for those very high keyword competing keywords Promoting email submits ‘could’ really be the way to start for newbies.

Anyway here in this blog I have written some email submit walkthroughs that I have done (which has become outdated already). The last successful email submit campaign I had was last year when I heavily promoted the Obama vs. McCain thing. The campaign nearly brought me $20+ for almost 1 1/2 straight months and I was promoting them through Copeac.

Just to let you guys know email submits work this way. The merchant  ‘is ‘said’ to pay affiliates (us) $1+ for every email submit lead. The truth behind the offer is that when someone enters his email, he is then presented to 20+ more incentivized offers which the merchant runs as an affiliate as well. Affiliates get scrubbed when the certain customer enters his email but never completed 6-7 more offers (both paid and free offers). On some shitty email submits offers, they even demand 15-20 offers to be completed before they even get you the $1.50 per lead! Sucks? Yes it does!

For the customer’s side (our lead) here is how it goes.  So what is going to happen about that “free” something on email submit? Well as I’ve said they’d be entered into a larger plethora of offers in which in order to get that freebie, they have to complete those. To be able to complete, they have to purchase something and again in the end, it’s like they just paid  that free stuff.

Convert2Media founder Ruck told me in their IRC channel that these types of offers are something that they don’t have control at. So the best thing they did is just to eliminate all email and zip submit offers. If you look around the other affiliate networks, Copeac has taken down all of them as well, Market Leverage on the other hand has lessened theirs. It seems like the once mighty and in-demand type of offer has rapidly plunged down.

So to end this one is it still worth promoting email and zip submit offers? Hmmm, partly? Well if you could go for other higher converting offers that don’t scrub your balls that much then why not just go for them instead? I would very much love to hear your opinion about it

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Ramblings Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate scrubs, email submits, zip submits

Site Flipping Or Affiliate Marketing

by Melvin · Mar 22, 2009

A lot of people in the blogging community usually want to learn either how to make money with affiliate marketing or how to start earning through flipping websites/blogs. Although its not your usual mano-a mano type of matchup, it still makes sense to tackle both.  So today I thought its interesting to tackle both and get your opinion about it.

Affiliate Marketing

Everyone in the building knows how much I love affiliate marketing. Not because I  make hundreds to thousands (most of the times, I’m even losing more than profiting 🙂 ), but because I just enjoy the whole process. I love the landing page thing, the PPC manipulation marketing stuff and the affiliate promotion overall. Although I haven’t been active with affiliate marketing this year (because of college), its still something I see myself doing in the future.

I’m not going to detail how aff.marketing works but basically its like promoting an offer and getting paid for driving leads/sales. Most affiliate marketing asshoes in the industry can be found on the bloody wickedfire forum and some of them are making five figures from affiliate marketing. If done properly, I can say affiliate marketing is the one and only business model that can go on autopilot (yes, money while sleeping!)

Site Flipping

Site flipping is something I haven’t done. Although through the years we’ve sold some really good websites, we really never considered it as site flipping. Flipping Blog and websites is easier than affiliate marketing in my opinion but the niche is as saturated as the latter. Some people really do good in it, and some people are happy to do it as a hobby.

What is site flipping? It’s simple as making a website or blog and then selling it. The idea here is creating a unique something and convincing the marketplace that, that “something” has a high potential and could yield income if marketed properly. Although, its not as automated as affiliate marketing, flipping people websites is a lot easier to do than the former. Another fact is that there is low risk and low cost in it. If the site doesn’t sell, you still have a lot of options with it.

Your Choice?

For the first time in this blog I will hold a poll. And its a poll about the two stuffs discussed above. What do you think is better overall? Affiliate Marketing Or Buying (or creating) And Selling Websites? Or maybe you can share your thoughts and add something to what has been discussed.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Flipping Websites, Top Posts Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, site flipping

I Just Hate Affiliate Marketing Sometimes

I Just Hate Affiliate Marketing Sometimes

by Melvin · Feb 26, 2009

I was taking the exams pretty much this whole week and had almost never had any look at internet-marketing related stuffs. All I have been doing is researching for something and finding tutorials so I can understand Math more. Anyways I forgot a facebook campaign I was running and I am surprised when I saw the cost increasing to (click for larger):

facebook campaign

Anyway I was promoting an offer about IQ quizzes (my obsession these days) and have sent about $850+ worth of leads. Not bad considering I just test-drove that offer while practicing in Facebook.

How bout you, wht do you doin’ these days?

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Ramblings Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, facebook ads, facebook campaigns

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