If you are an affiliate marketer, chances are that you have become sort of “Jack of all trades” with the exception of course to the rest of this proverb. You have some, even if they may be as limited as mine, programing skills, you may better understand the ins and outs of SEO, SEM, Pay Per Click advertising along with many avenues of marketing via social media. Just think about it. How many friends of yours have this knowledge? None, unless they are like you affiliate marketers.
If you ever experience “down” moments in your career don not get discouraged because you never know where and when the opportunity will be knocking on your door.
Although my intention to write this post was merely based on giving an extra “push” to my recent “joint venture”. I think describing the process may highlight certain principles we use in affiliate marketing on day to day basis.
This new venture of mine actually involves manufacturing a product. My partner has all the knowledge and skills to produce the product, I on the other hand am in charge of the marketing side of this venture. As such I was handed a task to work on the business and marketing plans for our product. So here are some points I followed when considering a marketing plan:
- What is the product or service that you will promote? This one is very simple and maybe evident for many, but I am sure that you have come across lading/sales pages that fail to convey clearly what these pages are selling.
- How will your customer benefit from products and services are promoting/selling? This ties right into #1, however I personally find my self omitting this point based on my presumption that a brand, a product or a service that I am about to promote is widely known. But even if you think of iPhone, when you read the reviews about this gadgetm most of them take into consideration other similar products that were available before. Your landing page would have better impact if you put an effort to explain to your visitors how they will benefit from using iPhone (vs Blackberry) for example.
- Do you know your potential clients? Do you know what websites your potential clients visit? Do you know what exactly are they looking for? This is an important factor and may help you in your advertising efforts. About a year ago, I have created a landing page that promoted pet insurance. I had difficult time finding the right audience for my landing page and have limited my advertising efforts to paid search. However after doing a little research and contacting website/blog owners that where providing good information and had solid traffic comprised of pet owners I have requested ad placements on several of them my earnings had tippled within days.
- How can your business be affected by advancements in technology or changes in economy? It is hard to believe that my new adventure will be affected by either, this is worth considering, especially if you are promoting an affiliate program that has a chance to be affected by both. There are few things you can do that many other super affiliates are doing. Keep on top of what is happening with your merchant. Google Alerts has been serving me in this area big time. Every time I am joining an affiliate program I immediately set up “news alerts” for my merchants and related industry. The more you a know about your merchant and the industry your merchant is in, the more successfully you can promote their products or services. But sometimes you can be truly alerted when the business, industry is in trouble.
- Consider your competition. If you are promoting or selling something you have no chance to succeed without considering your competition. With all the strengths that you competition may have, there also maybe big number of weaknesses. This is where you can capitalize. Not by exposing your competitors weaknesses- this actually can even hurt you. Your competitors are likely to have good position in the search engines as it is- by exposing their weakness you are just giving them a helping hand. Build on this knowledge. Try to rank for the keywords they are not ranking. Look around, do the research and act.
- Plan for the exit strategy. I often fail to consider the future of some of my websites if a merchant, for example, goes out of business. Fortunately it has not happened yet, but some of my website are aimed at product branding so when any of the advertisers go out of business, some of my domains and websites will become useless.
- You need to spend money on advertising: No one makes money out of the thin air. One of the biggest mistakes any marketer will make is to expect making money without spending some. It simply will not happen. I have been struggling in the past in this respect. But fro the very first time I have begun receiving checks I set aside 25% of the money earned for advertising needs of my websites.
My new adventure maybe of a different kind, however the steps I took can be applied to just about any business, but definitely to your future affiliate website.
So what is this my new venture? It is small and I mean really really small. It’s me and my partner our website and one product to start with. My new venture is Gloria Church Supplies, and the only one product at the moment: Orthodox Candle Stand. While our targeted market is small (US and Canada), there is virtually no competition, and the import of similar products from Easter Europe and Russia is expensive to say the least.
So I hope you will wish me good luck. I wanted to share this with my readers because some of you maybe struggling making your way in affiliate marketing. Just remember one thing – the knowledge you acquire now can prove to be of great value when the right opportunity knocks on your door.