Purple Squirrl

Affiliate Marketing News (Oct 29 to Nov 4)

More Businesses Using Web Marketing in the Bad Economy - Here’s something for the silver-lining department: Hard economic times will force more small businesses to become smarter marketers. They may even get Web sites. Check it out here.

Unlocking the potential of affiliate marketing - Spokesmen from Whitbread, Hilton and OMG are among the industry-leaders revealing the risks and rewards of affiliate marketing in this free online video. With marketing budgets under increasing pressure hear how your business could capitalise on the relative trackability and cost-efficiency of affiliate networks. Check it out here.

For Sale by Owner Wholesale Property Website Launches Affiliate Program - DiscountedProperties.com is a unique real estate listing service that caters to people looking for wholesale properties, homes for sale by owner, fixer-uppers and pre-foreclosures. DiscountedProperties.com has just launched an affiliate program where it will pay its “partners” a referral fee for any subscriptions resulting from their marketing efforts. Check it out here.

33 Reviews of the Best Affiliate Marketing Forums - A list of the top 33 affiliate marketing forums by Tim Scheer. Check it out here.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy - The Need Of Every Online Company - The online affiliate network has been well-integrated. But still there are online companies which are not able to achieve what they want. These online companies are in acute need of affiliate marketing strategy. To know more place your eyes on the following lines. Check it out here.

2nd Annual Casino Convention for Affiliates in Asia will be Held November 20-21 in Macau PR China - Ticonderoga Ventures, Inc. announces the second Annual Macau Casino Affiliate Convention will be held on November 20-21, 2008 in Macau at the recently built Venetian Hotel & Casino. Check it out here.

Old School Affiliate Marketing BEFORE The Internet - If you’ve ever looked at ways to make money online, then you’ve probably heard of affiliate marketing. To boil it down; affiliate marketing is delivering internet users through SEO or paid advertising to a merchants website in order to gain a commission on a sale or some other action. Check it out here.

Affiliate Marketing Network Blog Scorecard - As of October, Linkshare has apparently seen the light and jumped into the blogging fray. Good onya Linkshare. Check it out here.

Old School Affiliate Marketing BEFORE The Internet - If you think that only the novices have problems with affiliate marketing, think again. You’d be surprised to learn that many experienced individuals are by no means immune from making the same mistakes and bad decisions that ruin their progress. Check it out here.

Top 10 List of the Best Affiliate Networks - This list of the 10 Best Affiliate Networks will give you a general rundown on these affiliate networks and how they operate. Check it out here.

How to Choose The Best Affiliate Network Marketing Products - Affiliate network marketing has proved to be very lucrative. This concept is especially very important if you are in network marketing. Unfortunately, most affiliate marketers are not making the money they should be making. Check it out here.

Intuit awarded for Social Media Programs

Forrester awarded Intuit was presented with the Forrester Groundswell Award which recognize excellence from companies that accomplish business objectives using social applications and technologies. Intuit was recognized for their use of social media and user-contribution systems with submissions for its QuickBooks(R) Online Community, TurboTax(R) Live Community, TurboTax Inner Circle and QuickBooks Just Start Campaign.

Here’s some more info from their Press Release.

The awards focused on Intuits efforts to engage customers by embracing, listening and supporting through social media, and included:

– Intuit’s QuickBooks Online Community — Provides a place where small business owners can engage with each other. This Web site lets QuickBooks users ask and answer product-related questions and obtain general small business information. With three million visitors annually, the site offers a wealth of user-created content.

– Intuit’s Just Start campaign — Features YouTube-like video submissions and online voting, to energize people to start their own business. The nationwide, promotional campaign engaged new and aspiring entrepreneurs, and encouraged customers and bloggers to support those taking the next step to “Just Start.”

– The TurboTax Live Community — Makes getting answers to tax questions easier. This online forum is available to consumers as they prepare their returns. Going well beyond traditional in-product help and online support, the TurboTax Live Community delivers the most relevant answers when and where customers need them most.

– The TurboTax Inner Circle — Links some 17,000 customers with Intuit product managers, marketers and development teams, to spark innovation through collaboration. Customers submit their ideas through this Web-based community to improve TurboTax, and share ideas with Intuit employees through a variety of methods to bring their suggestions to life.

Intuit’s ‘Connected Services’ Strategy

Dan Maurer, Intuit chief marketing officer, said the award reflects the company’s commitment to connected services strategy that focuses on emerging social, mobile and global communications trends.

“Customers turn to us to help solve their important problems,” Maurer said. “We’re focused on giving them more ways to do that, whether it’s talking to us or providing forums where they can talk to each other. Being online — for customers and for Intuit — isn’t just an option. It’s a necessary component of success.”

SEO still focussed on text

In the video below, Google’s Search Evangelst Adam Lasnik explains that if you are going to post images and video, text is still needed to help search engines find your page. He says that using Flash as example is good for “engaging users but still focus on text as the primary mechanism for communicating”.

The objective of course is that you need to be found. Just like I’ve done here with this video, if I were to have just embed the video with a good post title the search engines would find it more difficult to find it .When you’re trying to make money online you need to be found via natural search. If you don’t use text then you haven’t really prepared your content properly from an SEO perspective.

SEO - Update on Metrics

As SEO matures it’s interesting to see that the value and sort of metrics is also changing. Stephan Spencer over at Marketing Profs writes an article about some of the metrics now being tracked for SEO.

Here are the metrics Spencer mentions -

1) Brand-to-Nonbrand Ratio
2) Unique Pages
3) Page Yield
4) Keyword Yield
5) Visitors per Keyword
6) Index-to-Crawl Ratio
7) Engine Yield

Numbers are interesting, they can certainly tell a story but only if sliced & diced the right way do they tell the accurate story.

Dating ebook experiments shows how to make money online

Lana R. (member of Gather.com) provides some great insight into an experiment she did with ebooks. She explains how she used the sale of ebooks to launch her affiliate marketing campaign. As you look around the web today this is an ongoing trend. There are a ton of free ebooks out there stuffed with affiliate deals. The author signs up with a bunch of affiliates on a certain topic then writes and ebook. In the ebook they suggest those affiliates as good destinations and the ebook customer then signs up with the affiliate - cha ching.

The experiment Lana R undertook was to use Torrent sites to advertise her ebooks and see how much she could push the envelope with SEX as the ebook topic. It turns out that even though these torrent directory sites (ie. the pirate bay) allow users to download apps illegally for the most part (or at least pushing the boundaries of what is legal) they will ban an ebook if the title is too obviously sexually explicit. So Lana R worked her experiment with a dating related ebook.

Here’s some info from her article on the affiliates she used -

Now I’ve tried a great number of adult dating sites, so here are two of my best performing STATS and results:

Disclaimer: These are my stats from various testing which I don’t track. So you should be able to get even higher conversion rates which turns to higher per signup $$$:

#1 - Iwant
7 uniques per FREE signup ($7.10 per free signup)
71 uniques per PAID signup ($50 *35/week* to $100 *279/week* per paid signup)

By far my best performing dating site, choose the Pay per Profile for starters and once you see more and more traffic, start using the Pay per Signup campaign instead.

#2 - AFinder
5 uniques per FREE signup ($0.35 per click)
55 uniques per PAID signup ($100 per paid signup)

My 2nd best performing affiliate site, only Pay Per Order is worth using.

Some of the takeaways from this experiment when creating an affiliate stuffed ebook -

1) You don’t need a website to make money online. Lana R did this without a webiste. She simply made the ebook and submitted it to torrent directories.

2) Title of the ebook has can’t be too sexually explicit or it will be banned.

3) The ebook should not be longer than 5 pages.

4) Create 2 or 3 versions of the ebooks and track success.

5) Sign up with 2 affiliates and track success. It’s best to do #3 & #4 independent of each other.

I like the idea behind this method but not crazy about the subject matter. So, I may try it on a different topic where I can provide good value.

Perfomics Details the 4 Pillars of Natural Search

The folks over at Performics have posted four articles explaining the 4 main things any website owner needs to be concerned about when optimizing their site to be found on Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine. If you are looking at moving the needle with SEO then take some time to study these articles.

The 4 Pillars of Natural Search

Pillar Number 1: Indexation
Pillar Number 2: Content Optimization
Pillar Number 3: Link-Building
Pillar Number 4: Distribution

Their posts are clearly meant as an primer since they do not delve into any of the tools required to do any of the research necessary. In the coming months I will be posting more info on what I’ve done with this blog regarding SEO and what tools I use. I’ll also post what Wordpress plugins are good to have for SEO.

Build Your Company with LinkedIn Recommendations

LinkedIn has posted on their blog some recommendtions from one of their users - Sasha Strauss, Managing Director, Innovation Protocol. He talks about how businesses can grow by employing a LinkedIn recommendation strategy. Here are the tips he shares in the post -

Get pre-qualified for new opportunities

• Represent your accomplishments by having an authentic, accurate depiction of your career
• Grow your network by uploading your contact list and reaching out to former colleagues, clients and employers
• Get recommended by connections who know and respect your work so that new opportunities have