Category Archives: Rants & Raves

Is Your Corner Store Split Testing You?

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The short answer is yes. It’s funny how when you get into the online marketing world you start to see things in the real world differently. We are being marketed to at practically every second of every day in some way. After you’ve spent a lot of time optimizing online campaigns, split testing ad copy & landing pages, and improving your ROI, it gives you a new perspective.

Corner Store

Your local real world marketing experiment

Here’s an example: your local corner store / gas station / convenience store. When you walk into that store (if it is a franchise with a corporate office somewhere), you are already participating in a marketing experiment. The placement of every product and display in that store has been carefully thought out, just like the layout of your latest landing page. It’s a bit different when there are physical elements instead of just virtual real estate to fill out, but there are a lot of striking comparisons.

You know how we will split test whether a landing page converts better when the call to action button is on the left side of the page or the right side of the page? Corner Stores do that same thing with that beverage cooler that’s always on the way to the register. You know, the one full of ice and frosty beverages on a hot summer day? It’s been placed in the perfect position to suggest to you that you should buy a drink. Not too close to the middle of the path, that would be obtrusive. Not too far away from the path, because then you would just walk right past it. This is just one example of the split testing that goes on in these retail locations. Don’t even get me started on how a massive store like Walmart has planned and laid out the process of marketing to their customers while they are in the store. The sheer mechanics of it are mind boggling.

The reason I’m bringing this up is to point out that if we online marketers always keep our eyes open, we might pick up on some great new ideas to test out in the online realm. The brick-and-mortar stores have been doing this a lot longer than we have, and they have spent millions of dollars (if not billions) learning how to get the most out of every customer that walks through their door.

So the next time you walk into a gas station to pick up a snack or head into Best Buy to get the latest Blu-Ray release, keep your eyes open. You might learn something.

The Campaign Is Over, What Now?

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When you’ve got a hot campaign rolling, it’s the best feeling in the biz.  You are making money.  Your hard work is paying off.  Time to take it easy and spend some money right?  Wrong!  That’s what you might be tempted to do, but in fact it’s time to buckle down.  Sooner or later you are going to get that dreaded email from your network: “The offer is paused”.  But how could this happen?!? It happens to every campaign sooner or later.  If you are lucky, there are other offers in the niche that you can switch over to.  With ringtones, for example, there are always a bunch of different offers to test against each other.  But if you are in something very specialized, then you might not be so lucky.  So since you need to get the gears turning again, let’s see what we can do to find the next campaign.

1. Ask your AMs for Advice

Affiliate Managers can be a huge asset to you when you are open to new ideas.  They will be far more helpful when you approach them looking for suggestions.  They don’t just want to sit there all day pushing offers to non-interested affiliates.  Put them to work! Tell them what you’ve been running.  Not everything of course, but tell them what offers are working so that they can give you more suggestions.

2. Test, test, test

This is where you put all of your inhibitions aside and try out things that you were too scared to try before you had some success.  You’ve had at least one successful campaign already, so there is nothing stopping you from doing it again.  You would be surprised how many of the most profitable campaigns came from things that marketers just tried on a whim, not thinking that they would be successful.  You can never predict what’s going to hit and what’s not.  Be a little more creative, think outside the box, try it out!

3. Find new Traffic Sources

There are so many traffic sources out there you would have a full time job just trying to test them all.  This might be a good time to try your hand at one or two new ones and see how they work.  You never know, maybe something about it will open up a whole new niche or campaign for you that had previously stumped you.  Different platforms have different targeting options and possibilities for you to exploit.  This ties back in to #2: be creative with your Traffic Sources as well!

4. Analyze your success

What was it about that successful campaign that made it a winner?  At what point did you really break through?  Was it profitable from the beginning or did you have to tweak it?  Did you use a landing page or direct link?  Where did you hear about that campaign?  Did you think it was going to be successful when you tried it?  Asking yourself these questions will bring you to some very interesting answers.  A lot of times you will completely forget how you actually stumbled onto a profitable campaign and just how easy it was to do.  There wasn’t anything magical about it.  In most cases you were just following a simple process of testing and exploring that led to a profit.  The good news is, this can be repeated!

Define Measure Analyze Improve Control

The Six Sigma DMAIC Method applies to our industry perfectly

This should all encourage you to put yourself out there and try new things.  The best part of being your own boss in this business is that you can do whatever you want!  Try new campaigns, try more of the same campaigns, try anything that strikes your fancy.  Just make sure that when your hit campaign dries up, you will still have a paycheck at the end of the month.

You Can Do Better Than That

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If you have worked and worked and finally got your first campaign profitable, congratulations!  Now it’s time to work some more.  You might think that just because you have made more money than you spent for the first time, you can sit on your butt and profit.  That’s one option, but that’s not the one that you should take.  You can do better than that.

Now it’s time to optimize that campaign.  What’s that you say?  It took optimization to get it profitable in the first place?  That’s great.  But now it’s time to optimize it some more.  If you are direct linking, it’s time to test out a landing page.  If you already have a landing page, it’s time to change up some elements on your page, or create a new page altogether.  I don’t care how much ROI you are getting on that campaign.  You can do better than that.

Key To Success

Little things matter.  On your landing pages, the color of the buttons matters.  The little picture in the corner matters.  The headline matters.  The body copy matters.  Also, test out a completely different look and feel on your landing page.  Start from scratch and do a new one with a completely different design style and concept.  Test this against the one that is already working.  If you are making money, don’t send all of your traffic to it, or even 50%.  Test it small with 10%-20% of your traffic.  If it beats your main offer (the “control”), then you swap it in and start the process all over.

One of the big things that separates the Super Affiliates from the little guys is that they spend a lot of time continuously working on their campaigns that are already making money.  Think about it, would you rather spend time getting more money out of a campaign that is already performing, or testing out 10 new ones to find that one that is going to make money at all?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should never test out new campaigns.  You don’t want to have all your eggs in the same basket either.  What I am saying is that no matter how well your campaign is doing, you can do better than that.

Go get it.

Writer’s Block

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So I haven’t posted in the month of September yet, and it’s half over.  Not good.  For some reason I’ve got writer’s block this month and can’t think about anything to blog about.  So it’s up to you guys now, tell me what you want to hear about!  Just post in the comments and tell me something that you’d like to know more about, problems you’ve been having with your marketing efforts, or whatever strikes your fancy.

Thanks in advance!

Getting Down To Business

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I’m feeling motivational today.  You might think that motivation is for wimps and losers.  You might think that motivation is cheesy.  You might want to think again.  Affiliate Marketing can be a very isolated industry.  Communication is all done over wires and screens, and it’s every man for himself out there.  You don’t have a manager telling you what to do.  You don’t have anyone setting goals for you.  If you aren’t careful, you can slip into a downward spiral very quickly when things go wrong.

I’m a firm believer in goals.  You have to set them, write them down on paper, and put them somewhere you can see them every day.  I have never missed a goal that I have written down this way.  Try it, you might surprise yourself.

These three videos have been viewed over and over again in my office.  The first one is about getting your mindset right.  The second one is a purely emotional motivating speech that gets me fired up every time.  The third one is inspirational simply because it is so fun to watch someone that has completely mastered his talent and ability.  You can laugh these off, or you can think about the difference that it would make in your paycheck if you take them to heart.  The choice is yours.

Demand Media Banks It Hard

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If you’ve ever searched Google for the answer to a practical question (and who doesn’t?), you have probably seen the website eHow.com.  It seems to appear on the first page of results for literally thousands of unique terms.  What you may not know is that the company behind eHow.com, Demand Media, has created a cash machine so big that Wall Street and even Google itself has taken notice.

Demand Media Banks It Hard

Essentially, Demand Media is a massive content creation company.  But instead of using employees to do the work, they outsource it all to freelancers.  Authors get paid a set price per article, and they are encourage to crank out several at a time with strict deadlines.  If you like writing but don’t have the time to create your own blog, this actually could be a nice way for you to make a little extra cash on the side.

I can’t help but be impressed by Demand Media and what they’ve done.  They took a simple concept that’s been around for ages, Article Marketing, and scaled it to an unimaginable degree.  The company is rumored to be worth around $1.5 Billion.  It will most likely be acquired by a major public company or have an IPO of its own in the near future.

The reason I felt this was worth a post is to remind all of us of the power of the internet and the opportunity that we have each and every day to get a piece of it.  Don’t get discouraged because you got in the game too late, there is so much money to be made out there.  The world hasn’t even begun to realize the changes that the internet has brought into our daily lives, and the more it gets integrated, the more opportunity there is for us to make money.

You don’t have to create something completely unique and original to make millions of dollars.  Just ask Google.  They certainly didn’t create the search engine, they just built a better one.  All you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open, and when you see something that could be done better or bigger or more profitable, do it!

Avoid Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder

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One of the strengths of Affiliate Marketers is that they can move quickly.  When Michael Jackson died last year, it only took a matter of hours before affiliates were targeting people searching for news on the subject.  This ability to move quickly is what sets affiliates apart from big advertising agencies and old-school marketing firms.  However, it can also lead to a paralyzing condition that I like to call Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder.

Monkey set up offers. Monkey not make money.

Monkey set up offers. Monkey not make money.

Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder (AffHD for short) is when you have so many campaigns to test that you end up throwing them all up against the wall to see what sticks.  Unfortunately, what often happens is that none of them stick.  Then you are left thinking that you have exhausted all of your resources and have nothing to show for it.  You might think that, but you are wrong.

What actually happened is that you became a campaign creation robot.  When AffHD kicks in, your creativity center in the brain turns off.  You become a monkey copying and pasting links from one place into the other, and when all is said and done you really haven’t added to much value to the process.  No wonder those campaigns aren’t converting, there was no real effort put into their creation!

New affiliates are particularly susceptible to AffHD.  After they have received a couple of conversions the first thing they want to do is go set up 10 or 20 more campaigns.  If it worked once why not just duplicate it on a large scale?  The problem is, they don’t understand why the first campaign worked.  They haven’t taken the time to split test targets, keywords, landing pages, and creatives until they know beyond a shadow of a doubt why that campaign worked.  If they don’t do that, they are leaving money on the table.  If they don’t do that, they haven’t squeezed every last drop of ROI out of the campaign that they already have running.  This must be done before you move on to start something new.

You should be spending 70% of your time working on scaling your successful campaigns and only 30% of your time testing out new niches.  Think about any other business you could be in.  If you made all of your money selling blue widgets, you wouldn’t suddenly focus all of your attention on trying to push green widgets, would you?  Of course not!  You would spend most of your time trying to sell as many blue widgets as possible.  Then when you have a spare hour or two, you could figure out if people want green widgets.  Does that make sense?

The key to avoiding Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder is simple: focus.

Were MMORPGs The First Social Media Platform?

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For the uninitiated, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs for short) are a type of computer game that is played over the Internet with a large number of fellow players who take on character roles in a fantasy or science-fiction based universe.  The most well-known and commonly referenced MMORPG is Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, which has roughly 11.5 million players worldwide at last count. Each one of those players is paying $14.95 per month to Blizzard for the pleasure of continuing to play the game. Talk about the ultimate rebill, how would you like to have approximately $171,925,000.00 coming in to your company’s bank account each and every month? Granted, that is just revenue, not profit. Even so, revenue of over $2 billion per year is enough to make even Warren Buffett stand up and take notice. But I digress…

World of Warcraft vs FacebookEarlier today I was talking to an affiliate friend of mine and World of Warcraft came up. Being a recovering WoW addict myself, it got me thinking about the concept of why these games are so popular. The gameplay isn’t entirely original, they use the same basic mechanics of the Role Playing Games that have been a video gaming staple ever since the original Nintendo Entertainment System was released. It’s also not that they are the latest and greatest games out there. In fact, most of these games (including WoW) have been around for many years. It is certainly not the allure of the best graphics and technological breakthroughs that makes these games so addicting. So what is the secret sauce?

The social interaction.

It’s not the endless quests or the epic boss battles or even the pursuit of better and more powerful gear. The ability to spend time online engaging and interacting with your peers is what keeps people coming back. In fact, the effect of the social interaction in these games is what keeps people so glued to them that they forget to eat, sleep, or go to work. It’s not just a set of computer-manufactured goals that are in play, you are constantly seeking the approval of your fellow players. Since there are so many people playing online at the same time, there is no pause button. You can’t just walk away when the phone rings or when the pizza guy comes to the door, if you do that then your character will simply stand still in the online world and most likely will be killed and/or cause the deaths of everyone in your group.

My point is this: even though the world at large is just waking up to the wonders of “social media” and how much it transforms the lives of everyone that uses it, gamers have been experiencing and subscribing to the very same thing for years and years now. The first MMORPG was called Ultima Online, and it was released on September 25, 1997. The creator of Ultima Online, Richard Garriot, even coined the term MMORPG himself. The most amazing part about this pioneering game is that it is still active and running online today, almost 13 years later. I’m not sure how many of you remember the internet circa 1997, but there was no MySpace, no Facebook, and definitely no Twitter.

The funny thing about all this to me is that today we are seeing social media heading right back to where it started, with games. Just look at the success of Farmville and the other games being created and pushed on Facebook and beyond by companies like Zynga. You can’t even get a Slurpee at 7-Eleven right now without being bombarded with advertising for social games, and now that Google has invested some major capital into Zynga, we are only going to see these games evolving further and further into the mainstream.

So were MMORPGs the first social media platform? In my opinion the answer is clear.

Affiliate AIM Etiquette

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AIM is a staple of life when you live and work on the internet.  There are quite a few different IM services out there, but AIM is the most widely used.  It’s gotten to the point where a good 90% of the conversations that I have with people in the industry are through AIM.  It’s quicker than picking up the phone, and for the most part it is less intrusive.  If they are in the middle of something they can get back to me when they are available.  It’s also nice to see your buddies login every morning, letting you know that you aren’t alone in what can be a very isolated industry.

That being said, there are some AIM users that tick me off. I made a tweet about this yesterday and it got a lot of responses, so I know I’m not the only one that feels this way.  It was about one of my pet peeves, when somebody comes on AIM and just types, “Hey,” and then says nothing else.

To be fair, I am sure that I have done this before and I am guilty of it too, because you want to see if the person is there before you go into typing a long discussion.  Saying, “Hey,” in itself is not what annoys me, it’s what comes next, which 9 times out of 10 is… Nothing!  They say, “Hey,” and I say it back, and then that’s it.  They never respond or say anything else.  What’s the point of that?  Just to make sure that I am there in case you actually do need to ask me a question?  Annoying.

emoteThe other thing.

That’s annoying.

Is when people.

Type fragments.

Of a sentence.

And hit return.

After each one.

So that you get.

16 different beeps.

One for.

Each line.

That they type.

If I’m in a conversation with you, I’m already paying attention.  You don’t need to get every single line out there for me to read before it’s a fully formed and logical sentence.  Take your time, form your sentence, and then hit return when you are ready to say it.  Now that wasn’t so hard was it?

If you are reading this article, then you are probably either nodding your head in agreement with me, or one of the offending parties and you will never AIM me again.  Don’t do that.  I love AIM.  I use it for at least 10 hours every single day.  Just follow some conversational etiquette just like you would if we were talking in person.  Can you imagine coming up to someone in person, saying, “Hey,” then just walking away?  In essence that is what you are doing online when you don’t respond.

That’s the end of my rant for today!