I wanted to redesign cost per news, to add some ad units and other groovy features. I hope you like it. Let me know if you think it needs anything. I’d love to hear your feedback. It still needs a bit of tweaking, so any ideas would be great.

Computers and the Internet have finally come full circle for the average American looking to make money through promoting products and services online. Blogging and site building has enabled many more people to earn money through affiliate marketing. I don’t know about save the economy, but affiliate marketing can definitely provide a means for more Americans to earn income online. Currently, there are several states that want to impose taxes on merchants with producing affiliates in those states, as is the case in New York. This can only be a bad thing and counter-productive to the growth of affiliate marketing as a vehicle for more people to earn money online. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of this happening, but people in their local states can protest and petition against this happening and get angry about it. It definitely has a negative effect on affiliates as merchants may choose to not working with affiliates in those certain states, which I don’t think is the answer at all. The merchants will just have to restructure their own margins to accommodate this change and make it work. The various affiliate networks seem to be stepping up and fighting this impending legislation more vigorously, so thats good. Everyone in the affiliate marketing world needs to mobile to fight this. The states are just looking for revenue anywhere they can get it.

Affiliate marketing truly is a vehicle towards earning income online by promoting various online retailers and websites. There are many supposed affiliate marketing gurus that novices come across, but they only want to sell you something themselves in the end by telling you how to make money through affiliate marketing. Stay away from anyone considered a guru! Affiliate marketing is very much about content, writing, and putting a heck of a lot of time in on your keyboard getting work done. I would venture to say that typing speed is one of the most important factors in how much content you can produce online. So I always recommend to work on becoming a faster typer. Doing a lot of reading online is also a good way to improve your own writing skills, which will help you craft better, more intresting content for your site visitors.

Blogging and blogs have really opened up the doors to many affiliates that struggle with creating their own sites in HTML. Now anyone can create a blog, put up the affiliate banners, and start writing. This is why I created the free affiliate site builder for the affiliate programs we manage. It allows you to get up and running with a .com or free subdomain site is under a minute. Everything is hosted for free and you can build as many site as you would like. There are other site building tools as well you can use like Synthasite. Once you are up and running with a niche site or blog, you can go to work adding articles and other useful/interesting information without worrying about building the pages in HTML and FTPing them to your server.

Content is one biggest part of affiliate marketing because sites with good content rank well in the search engines. Leveraging pay-per-click or PPC keyword marketing is also a great way to generate traffic to your site or in some cases directly to the merchants site, but more and more merchants are moving away from allowing that. So affiliates need to have their own niche sites or send the traffic to a dedicated page on their site which pre-sells for the merchant. A good pre-sell page can really help convince the consumer that they should buy from the merchant and maybe even promote a coupon code to increase conversion likely hood. Making PPC work is not easy at all but affiliates do make it work so it can be done successfully. I always recommend a very slow, controled experiment with about $100 to see how many sales occur and if any ROI is present. Testing out 100s of keyword niches in this manner may leave you with 20 or 30 that are profitable and can be run effectively to create a profit channel. Using PPC and organic SEO together is the best approach towards creating sustained long-term traffic and affiliate commissions. Make sure to make your site “stickier” by adding newsletter sign-up, Twitter follow, email this page, bookmark this page, etc.

Affiliate marketing is still a growing industry that is really seeing more interest due to the current economic crisis. As people look for way to generate additional revenue, they will be turning online. Affiliate marketing is the best way for the “average American” (I only mean that in the most general sense) to generate income by marketing products and services online. This industry needs to be supported and embraced in order for it to really flourish for more people. So yes I do think affiliate marketing can save the economy! This was more of a ramble than a well-constructed piece, so take it for what it’s worth. I’d love to know your feedback and thoughts! Happy Easter!

There are so many possible ways of driving traffic to your website, it’s hard to know where to focus first. This article will attempt to explain some of the best ways to drive traffic to your company’s website, including: organic search (SEO), pay-per-click search advertising, affiliate marketing, and database re-marketing. All of these methods are effective and must be done properly and with gusto. These concepts are in no particular order, but equally important to your overall Internet marketing mix.

Organic traffic or SEO is as old as the the Internet itself. I remember formatting the meta-tags on my web pages 10 years ago! Guess what…good, complete meta-tags still matter to your organic rankings, so make sure they are completely filled out on EVERY page of your site. There are basically 2 main aspects of organic optimization you need to focus on initially: meta-tags and on-page content. Like I said, every page of your site should have complete, unique meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords filled in. On-page content also has a huge amount of importance for gaining search rankings. I have sites that ranking organically just off the content on each page alone. If you are able to expand you content on certain pages like your category pages and product descriptions, you can potentially gain more search traffic off those pages, maximizing what you are currently doing with your site.

Pay-per-click search marketing is probably one of the most necessary, yet misunderstood types of campaigns you can run. All companies, in my opinion, should be running a good amount of PPC search in order to drive targetted traffic to their sites. Whether you handle this internally or outsource it, you should keep a very close eye on the performance and management of your PPC accounts with Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Your PPC accounts should be ever growing, as you test different groups of keywords to see what converts and what doesn’t. What converts you run with and what doesn’t you eliminate. The goal should be to attain the best ROI possible. Of course, your landng page should be as good as it can be to best convert the traffic into sales or leads.

Affiliate marketing is my favorite topic and where you should be focusing a great amount of resources and money. A well-managed affiliate program should always be growing in the number of participants and active producers. Many companies launch affiliate programs and just expect them to grow on their own. This will occur to a certain degree, but plataeu quickly without good affiliate management and a good affiliate growth strategy. Companies should be trying their best to make it as lucrative as possible for affiliates in order to get the most production possible. Again, having a good converting website is key to ensuring your affiliate traffic will convert and produce commissions for your affiliates. Affiliates should be treated with the utmost respect and given as many tools to become success as possible. At all times, affiliates should be worked with and motivated to produce more revenue, as well as new affiliates should be recruited into the program to grow the number of participants. If either of these 2 things aren’t going on, you are not maximizing the growth of your affiliate channel.

Re-marketing to your database is one of the most powerful ways to generate revenue for your company. You can send promotions, deals, and coupons to motivate your database to purchase for the first time or re-purchase more products. Re-marketing to your database at the right interval and with the right message is essential to getting a good response. Subject line is everything! Getting people to open your email promotions is key to getting them to act, so make sure to make your subject lines compelling. Email content is also improtant to getting your database members to move into action.

Once you have a good strategy in place for all of these traffic driving methods you are ready to make it happen! Make sure to have the right people or companies handling these tasks for you, as they are extremely important. Don’t assign a new employee to manage your PPC or affiliates, you will suffer the consequences or just not grow like you should. I hope this mini-article was an enjoyable read. I couldn’t mention everything, but you get the jist. If you would like to have a conversation about these concepts make sure to email us or leave your comment below! Now get out there and drive some traffic!

I just got done with the Commission Junction Coupon Code webinar and I thought it was really good. Very well prepared and full of information and good ideas. Here are some of the highlights from the couopn code webinar:

- Coupon codes are gaining popularity based on the bad economy, here are the latest percentages of where web visitors are going on the Internet: Search 37%, Coupons 25%, Comparison sites 17%, Auctions 17%

- Coupons are the fastest growing category on websites, boasting
#1 in the top 10 website categories
- October 2008 to November 2008 up +32%
- Unique visitors to coupon sites are up almost 50% over a year ago
- Coupon Sites in general are up 34% year or year growth
- 62% of US shoppers are using coupon when shopping online.
- Searches for “coupon” doubled to 19.9 million, while “discount” rose 26% to 6.3 million searches.

Strategies for merchants using coupons effectively with affiliates:
- Plan for Success
- Add negative match to search policy
- limit redemptions
- Purchase threshold
- Beware coupon stacking

Coupon Code’s viral nature: Coupons can be great because they get spread around to firends and family.

How to maximize coupons so they don’t hurt your margins:
- Coupons aren’t all or nothing
- Choose higher margin products
- Coupons can be product specific
- Use coupons to clear out inventory
- Use custom codes and links
- Create exclusive coupons
- Use vanity coupon codes

- Recent studies are showing that online shoppers are shopping specifically because of special offers and coupons.
- Coupon codes create urgency

Regarding whether coupon codes create long-term customers or not:
- Coupons create customer engagement
- Customers love the “treasure hunt”
- Loyalty is built-up over time

Disspelling the myth that coupons destroy the brand:
- Holiday Season 08 - coupons really went mainstream
- Even high-end stores are in the game
- Have a good strategy when rolling out coupons

Advice for affiliates on how to use coupon sites and make their site more valuable. Goal should be to have a site visitors bookmark and share with their friends. Check and see how well the coupon is performing on your site. Put your coupon codes into your newsletters. Develop long-term advertiser relationships.

Advice for merchants:
- Not just a discount strategy
- Great for new customer acquisition
- Coupon code traffic sticks

Questions and Answers:
- Can coupons be offered without codes? Yes they can. Doesn’t have to be a code, could be free shipping, or new product launches, and gift cards.
- What are the best perfoming offers for coupons? Percent or dollar off. Answer: some sites see dollar off and some see % off converting better. Recommendation to advertiser is to test different strategies and maybe a combination. Research shows that dollars off the sale are more effective, but it depends on the nature of the business/offer.
- What is the negtive match aspect about? Answer: advertisers should make clear in their SEM policies whether they want the affiliates to show up in search for your trademarks with the word coupon.
- Will the affiliate receive the commission if the link isn’t click by the buyer. Answer: is to embed to coupon code within the text link or banner ad.
- Vanity codes are higher converting and affiliates like them too!

All and all, I think it was a good webinar. They covered most of the hot topics and there was a good amount of statistics to back it up. I personally think all affiliate merchants should be using coupon codes to their benefit. I’d love to know your opinion on coupon codes best practices for affiliates and merchants. Thanks!

Everyone knows that Google and the other search engines look at the number of inbound links you have going to your site as one of the factors determining your website’s search rankings. There are many ways to acquire more inbound links to your site, but the one that I find works well, and is enjoyable, is blog commenting. There are literally millions of blogs out there that you can go and comment on. When I am looking for new blogs to comment on I usually do a Google Blog Search. This will pull up lots of recent blog posts under a particular search phrase. This method is particularly good for finding niche blogs to comment on. Once you find some good blogs to comment on, you can add their RSS feed to your feed reader to get their latest blog posts instantly. When you post a blog comment you are asked for your website url, which is where the click-thrus and link juice comes from. Not all blogs are “do follow” however which means the search engines spiders are following those links, but I tend to not worry about that because just posting a lot of comments is good no matter what.

Another cool aspect of blog commenting is that at the bottom of most blog’s comment box you can choose to be emailed when someone replies to the comment or comments on the blog post. This is great because it reminds you of the conversation and allows you to go and post another comment quickly and easily. When you have done a bunch of blog commenting, it will pretty much self-perpetuate itself. When you are getting 50-100 emails a day from various blog conversations, consider yourself as having arrived! Always make sure to post quality blog comments or your comments won’t be approved and therefore not posted on the blog.

When getting heavily involved in commenting on blogs, often times you will be introduced to the blog owners and that can turn into a great friendship. Often times blog owners will email you or comment reply to thank you for your participation. The blog owners want you to post good comments to add content to their sites and keep the conversation lively.

Blog commenting is one fantastic way to build your website’s inbound links, thereby increasing traffic and rankings. It does have to be done in abundance to get a good effect, but every little bit helps! Like most things in online marketing it’s a volume game, so the more effort you put into it the more you can get out of it. Let me know your thoughts about effective blog commenting strategies. I look forward to hearing from you!

Linkshare has released a deep linking interface which allows affiliates to link directly to any page of a merchant’s site. This is a really cool feature Linkshare as added. Many affiliate request the ability to promote or review a particular product. There are tools, link Popshops, which allow affiliates to pull the product code from any CJ, Linkshare or Shareasale merchant with a datafeed. This new Link Share tool could really enable more affiliates to get productive! We’ll see how it goes…let me know your thoughts about Linkshare’s new deep linking tool!

There is some talk about California adopting a similar law to the NY state affiliate tax law. Linkshare has just put up a page to address the questions about this issue. Here is the link: http://www.linkshare.com/advertisers/ca_state_tax/

I really hope states think about the affiliates best interests when looking at these issues. Let me know what you think!

One of the biggest impediments to newer affiliates getting into the affiliate game is their lack of ability to get a niche website online fast and easy. Most savvy affiliates already know how to get a site online and start publishing articles and content. However, most newbie affiliates have a harder time setting up their site, adding the affiliate banners and adding pages of content to their sites. Often times, affiliates will turn to site builders that are hard to use and cumbersome. Enter the free affiliate site builder, a tool created to help both novice and experienced affiliates to set-up a new, niche affiliate website for their favorite merchant quickly and easily. The tool was developed by Experience Advertising a leading affiliate program management agency.

The free affiliate website builder leverages the Word Press platform to enable affiliates to erect a new site under a minute. As far as I know it’s the fastest website builder on the planet. You can build either a subdomain site or build a site on your own domain name. In its beta-version release, the affiliate site builder has constructed over 700 sites over last few months. Currently, the site builder tool is only available for affiliate programs managed by Experience Advertising via the Commission Junction affiliate network, but soon will be able to be used for general website building purposes. The cool thing about the affiliate site builder is that it automatically adds the affiliate banners and affiliate’s PID into the site’s layout. So when the site is done the affiliate just has to log into their Word Press back-end and started adding content and articles. What could be easier?

Initial feedback has been tremendous and soon the site builder will be adding additional features to further enable affiliates to produce and syndicate their content quicker and easier. Let me know what you think about the free affiliate site builder tool. Oh did I mention we are hosting all the affiliate’s sites for free forever? Let me know if you have any suggestions to make the tool even better, I look forward to hearing from you all!

Most companies, when running their PPC search campaigns, only reserve phrases in their ad groups with 1,2, and sometimes 3 words, such as “Fort Lauderdale Florist.” However, according to Hitwise, longer search queries averaging 5 or more words long increased 10% in Janauary over a year ago. This represents a tremendous opportunity for both advertisers and affiliate marketers. Usually, keyword tools only provide shorter phrases as suggestions, so it’s up to you to come up with good, longer combinations. You should also look to anticipate what people might be search for, such as: “Where do a find a florist in Fort Lauderdale.” You might still come up for some of these phrases with the broad-match features, but it never hurts to have a bunch of longer, more obscure phrases reserved in your account. If you are using an SEM firm to manage your PPC you need to speak to ask them what strategy they are using to build out and test new search phrases. If they don’t really have a strategy tell them to get one or go elsewhere for your PPC management. If you are handling your PPC management internally you should evaluate your keyword lists every month and look to build them out. Your keyword lists should never be “finished”, they are always a work in progress. If you hear back otherwise re-evaluate who is managing your PPC.

For affiliate marketers this represents a great opportunity to get cheap clicks on obscure, longer search phrases. Since more advertisers running affiliate programs don’t use a lot of longer phrases, it’s a golden opportunity to get that positioning for cheap. If you are an affiliate and would like to discuss how I go about building keyword lists, you can contact Evan through this website. Now get out there and build out your keyword files darn it!

Hey all, I wanted to invite everyone in the Internet Marketing world to join our new Cost Per News Social Network powered by Ning. Our new social network will be bring together many affiliates and affiliate marketing professionals, into one community. The purpose of our new affiliate marketing social network will to help affiliates learn to be better, productive affiliate marketers. Please check it out and feel free to make any suggestions you may have. Tell all your friends about it. Click here to join the Cost Per News affiliate marketing social network! Thanks!

I just received an email that the Overstock.com affiliate program is moving from the Linkshare Affiliate Network to the Commission Junction Affiliate Network. And guess what? They email had no From in the sender as has been the cases for ages with the Overstock.com affiliate newsletters. That has always irked me! I even pointed it out to them but they couldn’t seem to get it fixed. I’m sure they will better luck sending emails properly through Commission Junction. Here is the main information in the email I received:

We are delighted to announce that the Overstock.com Affiliate Program will be transitioned from the LinkShare network to the Commission Junction network. As many of you are aware, we have had a long and mutually successful partnership with LinkShare, but feel at this time it is in the best interest of our Affiliate Program to make this change. We look forward to and appreciate both networks’ commitment to ensuring that it is a smooth process for our publishers. The transition to Commission Junction will begin within the next three to four weeks.

It goes on…in other news…and proceeds to list out a bunch of specials. Going for one last promotion push before bailing Linkshare! Hope the transition from Linkshare to CJ goes well, this can be a very difficult thing to accomplish.

In the bleakness of the current U.S. recession, a bit of good news about online retail from ComScore. Online retail sales were up 2% in January compared to a year ago. However, the ComScore report also mentioned that twice as many people think the economy will get worse over the next 3 months and three-quarters polled are cutting back on their spending, which isn’t a good sign for retailers. Traditional retailers took a pretty big hit in January, with sales declining between 6% and 14% in categories like cars, electronics, furniture, and apparel.

These numbers reinforce the need to focus more resources into online retail as more people shop on the Internet as opposed to going out to the malls and stores. People are looking to save money anyway they can, so they are visiting coupon sites more than ever! This is excellent news for the affiliate marketing community.

Some of the categories losing steam this year already are luxury good, event tickets, toys, and office supplies. Looking for ways to save money, consumers have been flocking to coupon websites, which is great for the affiliate marketing industry. Coupon code sites drive a tremendous amount of traffic for online retailers, and this trend should only increase throughout the year. So online retailers should look to push out more coupons and deals through their affiliates to take advantage of the changing tides.