But I did.

And I’m going to show you what *you* could have done had you gotten off your ass, given up the SEO fame game bullshit and actually worked hard and followed through on my advice.

A few months before I wrote that post, I bought a domain with the intention of building a site about all things BlackBerry. That domain was BBGeeks.com. It was a brand new domain, had no age, no backlinks and was an absolute blank slate.

Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares

Now before anyone whines about how I have a company with employees and about how it is so much easier for me to build websites than the average person, I’d like to take the opportunity to call bullshit on that excuse. While I do indeed have a company that specializes in developing affiliate brands and affiliate websites, we own numerous sites. My employees and myself are spread out between them. The amount of effort it took to create and market this site could have indeed been accomplished by one person, working diligently. Save the excuses for someone who doesn’t know that they’re just that – excuses.

Creating the site

I took every piece of my site creation advice from my affiliate evolution post into account when we created the site.

Start buying brandable and not keyword laden domains. If you can include a keyword, great, but branding is important and neccessary.

I bought what I felt was a brandable domain name in BBGeeks.com. We bought BlackBerryGeeks.com as well, but we didn’t want to build on it in case there were ever trademark issues with RIM. But we wanted to make sure a competitor couldn’t grab it later in the game and piggyback on the brand we intended to build.

Learn what unique content really is and start creating it…

We created in-depth overviews of service providers and of hosted BlackBerry exchange service providers. We started doing reviews of BlackBerry software after actually downloading and testing every single one we reviewed. We started blogging three times a week even though we knew we didn’t have any readers – but we blogged as if we did.

Give your site the ability to create a dialogue instead of a monologue.

We created the ability for our readers and users to leave reviews on all the companies and software we did write-ups about. We also had the traditional ability to leave comments on blog posts. We sent emails to family and friends asking them to review any of the companies they had experience with to give the reviews a kick-start.

What I’ve found over the last year or two is that design matters.

I contracted a website designer to create what I felt was a kick ass “look” for the site when we initially created it. It cost a little bit of cash, but I felt the end result and the need to be taken seriously by larger tech sites was worth the upfront investment.

Plan for expansion before you need to.

While we obviously made the BBGeeks site to be niche, we picked up a few other niche and general smartphone related domains that we figured we could develop later if the BBGeeks site was successful from a branding, traffic *and* revenue standpoint.

Differentiate yourself and add value. Let’s get one thing straight. Google doesn’t hate affiliate sites. Google hates shit affiliate sites.

Initially, our POD was our overviews of the cellular service providers (instead of the industry standard, which was to review the phones) and our overviews of the exchange hosting companies from a BlackBerry specific standpoint. Those were our “technical” point of differences.

As time went on, we realized (what we felt were) our two biggest competitors in the space were both targeting very different markets. One targeted the uber BlackBerry tech enthusiast the other targeted IT guys that worked extensively with BlackBerry. Both segments were basically advanced BlackBerry users. We realized one very large market – the newbie or casual user – wasn’t really being *focused* on. So we decided we would fill that hole. We decided that would be our “branding” point of difference.

Monetizing the site

In my original article, I mentioned the importance of having multiple revenue streams when you build a website. Affiliate marketing will always be the “core” for me, but having as many “income baskets” as I can is important to me.

Having multiple affiliate programs for not only different types of items (widget covers as well as blue widgets) that make sense for the core topic, but also having different suppliers for blue widgets themselves.

We have no less than 20 affiliate partnerships – including a few white-label and co-branding partners – for BBGeeks.com. Additionally, for each “type” of item we have affiliate relationships for, we have multiple merchants we can refer to for each. This not only allows us to refer our users to the best deal, but it also allows us to protect ourselves against any one merchant going under or merchant abuse.

Sell advertising.

We work with an ad network that sells our advertising space to big name companies that want to get access to our millions of impressions per month. We also sell advertising via contextual advertising channels.

Start creating methods to contact users without them having to visit your site.

We have an RSS subscriber base in the five figures range and a opt-in mailing list that is about triple the size of our RSS subscriber count.

Consider becoming a merchant if your site is successful enough that the reward for the effort is there.

While we have no interest in becoming a merchant, we were able to strike up a white-label partnership that allowed us to partner with one, under our own brand, which allowed us to create the BBGeeks store.

Now, if you have a great site and have a strategy to monetize that site, you’ll need to get it traffic in order to go through the effort to put those monetization strategies in place (and have the leverage to get the bigger deals).

We obviously didn’t start out selling advertising (because we didn’t have the impressions) or with a larger affiliate deals (because we didn’t have the traffic to obtain them). But, we knew they were all plausible avenues and had their contact information ready for the second we had the traffic numbers to do so.

Getting the traffic

All of the above is useless without eyeballs. You can have the best site and the best monetization strategy, but unless you are able to effectively promote it, all you have is a “could have been.” You need to start off with the basics… good site structure, good keyword research and good on-page SEO. After that, it’s all about site promotion.

Learn how to develop site traffic without the search engines… Understand social media optimization and personalized search as seperate entities, as well as the effect that social media optimization has on SEO…

I’ve already discussed how successful our guerrilla marketing tactics have been with Twitter. The subsequent traffic we’ve been able to develop as a result of it speaks for itself. We’ve used contests, humor, linkbait pieces spread virally through social channels and more successfully. And our efforts towards non-search focused traffic and branding has – as expected – actually helped our search engine ranks in the long run.

Learn to market a site through more “traditional online channels”.

We’ve used press releases, we’ve created what is now one of the top BlackBerry podcasts on iTunes (yes, we’re aware of the irony) and have done numerous “media intros” to ensure the “tech press” knows about our site. Keep in mind, we never “asked” them for anything… we just wanted to let them know we existed and welcome any feedback they might have. Kind of like shaking hands at a cocktail mixer.

There is still a place for the tried and true methods of link development providing you update your execution and strategy in relation to them to keep up with the current times.

Don’t think for a second we ignored the traditional “pounding the pavement” for links. While our core focus when obtaining any link was usually “will this get us traffic?” we made sure that the links we did get had as much “value” as we could as far as anchor text and other inbound link factors went whenever possible. If we didn’t have the content to get a link from a site we wanted one from, we created it. And we made sure “it” was killer enough to get us the link.

When we did our post on free BlackBerry games we didn’t just throw a bunch of links on the page. We downloaded each game, played with it, picked what we felt were some of the best, listed the rest in categories with short descriptions and organized it in a way we hoped would make it easy for people to use. It took over a week to create. And we still keep the list updated and maintained regularly. But the end result is the most trafficked page on the site, both via search engines and referring sites. It was a lot of effort, but it was a lot of reward.

That, not blog comment bullshit, is *real* link development folks.

Developing relationships within your niche can be vital.

We reached out to all the larger BlackBerry themed sites when we started out. Some ignored us, but most were very friendly. We made friends, did guest posts, helped cross promote each others contests and sites when possible (and when it made sense). While we compete, we compete on a mature level. We’re glad for the relationships we’ve developed. And now that we are a “larger BlackBerry themed site” ourselves, we try to give back to the new generation of “up and comers” within the niche when we can.

The end results

We’re proud of what we’ve been able to build BBGeeks.com into. Nothing is more awesome than having a complete stranger on a plane recommend the site to me when they see me playing with my BlackBerry or having Dave Naylor tell me how much his wife loves our site over a pint at a conference.

In the approximately two and a half years that BBGeeks.com has been live, we’ve managed to develop over 100,000 backlinks to the site. Yes Virginia, you can compete without buying links. We’ve got over 25,000 Twitter followers who actually engage with us on a regular basis. Our RSS and mailing list subscribers reach well into the five figures and our podcast has a subscriber base in the four figures.

People searching for our brand (”bbgeeks”) and variations of our brand (bb geeks”, etc) reach into the high four figures each month (they like us, they really really like us!) and I think those brand searches are some of the search terms I love seeing the most in our analytics each month.

While we are quantified with Quantcast, we don’t have the code on every page of the site for various reasons. That said, even quantcast figures show you that they know about nearly 500,000 unique visitors per month and our traffic keeps climbing, because we keep working hard to be a valuable resource:

As far as revenue goes, I’m not going to give specific numbers. Much like I said during Outspoken Media’s first annual report, it’s frankly none of your damn business. But what I will tell you is that the annual net revenue you could have made with the site would have put you in the top 15% of annual household incomes. I bet that kinda makes you wish you’d have gotten off your ass and built a site in a niche you could love with a quality you could be proud of, eh?

Comments are closed on this post. I don’t want to hear a bunch of comments. In the words of Nike, “Just Do It.”

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Had Success with Affiliate Marketing

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Had Success with Affiliate Marketing

I’ve used (and still use) a lot of datafeeds in the construction of my affiliate sites and have learned quite a bit in regards to using them over the years. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pass along some of what I’ve learned to help a few Twitterkin out.

Information for Merchants

The first and foremost rule merchants need to follow to protect themselves is that you should never, EVER give your affiliates an exact copy of the datafeed you use on your own site. While Google does their best to figure out who is the original owner of duplicate content when they find it, bottom line is that a lot of it comes down to site age and strength.

What that means is that the older and stronger (in regards to quality links) a site is, the better the chance it has of winning out as the “original source” of the content, and as a result, being the page to appear in the search results when that content is deemed the most relevant for the users query.

Top affiliates have been at this game a long time and as a result, many have aged, strong sites. If you give them an exact copy of your own feed, you could end up knocking your own site out of the search results for your terms.

Does that mean you shouldn’t offer a datafeed to your affiliates?

HELL NO!

Datafeeds are a valuable tool for affiliates, and one you should be offering if you have a large inventory of products. The key is to provide affiliates with a datafeed without potentially harming your own rankings. And that means creating a separate, rewritten datafeed for your affiliates to use with rewritten product descriptions.

And no, you don’t need to create a separate feed for EACH affiliate. You simply need two versions of your feed. One for you (the merchant) and one for all of your affiliates to use. They’ll find some tips on dealing with their own potential duplicate content issues with other affiliates below.

And while I have the attention of a few merchants, here are some additional tips on creating happy, profitable affiliates.

Information for Affiliates

Now, you’ll have to respect that I can’t give you EVERY tip I’ve learned over the years about using datafeeds… a girl has to keep some form of a competitive edge. But I can share a few things with you and folks can feel free to leave more tips in the comments below if they’d like.

Accept that the feed isn’t “plug and play” when it comes to SEO

Using an affiliate datafeed acts as a solid foundation of content for your individual product pages and is not “your content” if you want to do well with SEO (and aren’t the “strongest” affiliate site using the feed). You’re going to need to create additional fields in the datafeed and fill it with unique content.

That content can be additional information about the product or uses of the product, additional information that describes the product or anything else you can dream up. But you need to value add to make the content “technically unique” AS WELL AS “conceptually unique“.

Switch things up

Don’t display things in the same order that they appear in the feed. If there are 8 different fields describing the product, switch up the order in which they appear from the feed or randomize how they appear from the feed if you have the programming skills to do so (we’re talking height, width and depth type fields here and not placing the height above the description).

Change up the image names

I don’t ever leave the images on the merchant’s server. I always download the images to my own site (and size them properly, if they aren’t already) and give them new naming conventions. It helps separate you from every other affiliate site out there using the same feed.

Change up the affiliate links

Even ignoring the duplicity of the datafeed, you should be running your affiliate links through redirects in a blocked folder for your own tracking purposes.

Add value

Every time I say this phrase in regards to affiliate marketing, a Googler gets their wings. But you need to add some additional value to the feed if you want your site to pass a hand review (even if you’re not in a competitive – aka “watched” field, you never know if your competitors agree with me or not).

This might be giving visitors the ability to leave reviews, this might be giving users the ability to compare prices between different merchants, this might be a lot of things. But differentiation on a true scale, in addition to the technical differentiation listed above will put you a long way ahead of your competitors that are too lazy to do so.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Datafeeds and Duplicate Content

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Datafeeds and Duplicate Content

Sadly, due to my flight and this silly little thing called “lunch” that the speakers seemed to be really interested in, I was only able to make it to one session today: Amazon Widgets for Fun and Profit.

I was more interested in the “how to use widgets” angle of this session than I was the Amazon part, so that’s what I’m going to focus on.

What’s a Widget?

They’re rich Web gadgets or mini applications that improve the richness and functionality of your Web site. In a nutshell, they allow visitors to interact with the data that interests them from wherever they are on the Web. Widgets allow others to share your data on other Web sites and they allow you to take advantage of other people’s data.

For example, in the session speaker Zahid Khan told the audience how they could take advantage of the many widgets provided by Amazon to help increase the functionality and usefulness of their Web site. Basically, you get to bring Amazon to your site and to your users, which can help increase both clicks through rates and conversions.

Widgets allow you to display product information in fun, interactive ways, to encourage users to play around with your site, to increase your own functionality and to serve as content. The great thing about widgets is that they’re highly customizable and available in many different sizes, colors and themes so that they can become part of your site and virtually indistinguishable from your own content.

Best Practices for Widgets

• Select the right widget for the job: There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits all solution. You have to take into consideration what you’re doing. What are you trying to monetize? Is it a product-focused site? A personal blog? A movies/music site?

• Place it in the best available spot: The center-of-page size widget is good for one-off, very topic-specific widgets. Meanwhile, banner/sidebar-sized widgets are best for products that are relevant over a long period of time. Use free-size widgets when you control the size of the ad spot.

• Personalize the widget control: Add user comments to your widgets. Your customers are more likely to engage with your products when you’ve endorsed them with user comments. If you don’t have time to add individual comments to each product, personalize the title of the widget. It’s easy to do and helps get around ad blindness.

• Change widget content regularly: Handpicked wins over automated selection any day. Related to this, if you do use Amazon widgets on your site, Widget Source is a way to easily change widget content programmatically in the code. It will also give you total control over the look and feel of the widget and opens up the door for you to create some really cool mashups.

• Make The Widget Part of Your Site: During the session, Zahid went through a number of Web sites and challenged the audience to spot the widget on the page. And it was hard to do. That’s one of the powers of widgets – how easily you can customize them to really become part of your site and make them indistinguishable from your actual site content.

Widgets are really one of those things you should be paying close attention to right now. I was actually surprised that there were only 30 or so people in this session. Maybe it’s simply because it was the morning on the last day of Affiliate Summit or maybe people just don’t get it. Personally, I work for a company that’s a huge proponent of building widgets for clients. I guess the rest of the world hasn’t caught up yet. Their loss.

And that’s it from me from Affiliate Summit. I hope you enjoyed the daily coverage and thanks to Rae for giving me a shot to experience it. Even if I did had to run around Vegas on a broken foot.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Summit West – Day 3 Mini-Recap

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Summit West – Day 3 Mini-Recap

Ready? Okay.

Facebook’s ad platform is a gold rush for marketers

I’ll be honest, I kind of wrote off the whole Facebook ad platform thing when it came out a year ago. Social media + ads just never seemed like a winning combination to me. However, it seems I was wrong. [See, Rae, I can admit that. Now you try.] **(Note from Rae: I never dismissed Facebook, so nothing for me to admit.)

During the panel speakers Zac Johnson, Jeremy Schoemaker, Alex Schultz, and Dan Murray all commented on the power found within the ad platform and its ability to blend high conversions with click prices that can fall as low as just a couple of cents. Alex went as far as to say today’s Facebook is very similar to what AdWords was back in 2002-2003. It has that same gold rush feel.

Why should you pay attention to Facebook’s advertising platform? Because there are 150 million active users, with half signing onto the site daily. It’s an engaged core network filled with real people. The targeting offered by Facebook is the real bread and butter and why people should be paying attention. Facebook basically allows you to name any interest and then it will grab out all the people who have listed that in their profile. It gives you a huge ability to increase conversions if you’re smart enough to create a separate landing page based on interests.

Combine the engaged user base, the targeting, the high quality reporting and the fact that you can get single cent CPCs if you do it correctly – and Facebook starts to look like a virtual goldmine. Jeremy said that there’s a huge marketing imbalance that makes it a great opportunity until the rest of the world gets caught up, especially for targeting folks on a local level.

If you’re not yet playing with Facebook ads…you should

Show you’re listening, and affiliates will empathize.

One of yesterday’s big takeaways was creating relationships with vendors. Today, a lot of the conversation was centered on the act of communication itself.

In the Facebook session, Alex Schultz spoke about some of the problems users have had in the past with Facebook’s ad program: The ad review is inconsistent, there’s no bulk upload option, they put restrictions on the type of ads allowed, there wasn’t enough support people to go around, etc. Complaints like that for an ad platform that is barely a year old could kill it. But it hasn’t killed Facebook, because Facebook listens, and as a result, they’ve been able to not only improve on known complaints, but also to steer the conversation.

Jeremy noted that he even though he’s not a big Facebook ad spender (maybe $500-$1,000 a week), he often gets emails from different Facebook support people curious to see if he’s okay or if he needs anything. It gives him an outlet to bring up small issues before they become larger and it shows Jeremy that they value him. It keeps communication open and promotes goodwill.

People buy from people…and video captures that

Last week on the We Build Pages blog, I wrote about why sites should be creating compelling video content for their Web site. Today, I received another lesson in the importance of video.

Why is online video powerful for affiliate marketing?

• If you’re an affiliate, you want cutting edge content on your Web site that you don’t have to create yourself so that you can focus on driving traffic.
• If you’re the merchant, you want to grab eyeballs and get people back to your Web site to collect the conversion.

According to speakers, Jonathan Stefansky, Melissa Salas, Michael Jenkins and Marty Fahncke, video creative is phenomenally more successful in generating clicks and conversions than simple text. By adding video to your affiliate site, you’re being given a better way to convert those eyeballs.

The word everyone is tagging on to talks about online video is “potential”. Marketers aren’t in it for what’s being brought to the table today, but what it can do in the future. There’s a great opportunity here because people are so hungry for video. YouTube gets more search traffic than Microsoft with 77 million uniques. That’s how badly people want to watch video. You just have to figure out how to capitalize on that thirst.

We’re in a bronze age where nearly anybody can create content. The Web is a text-based medium for the most part. Today’s panelists believe that this going to be completely revolutionized where there will be much more audio and video content in the future.

How to be successful

Dave Taylor rocked the Using Social Media with Affiliate Programs session this afternoon, offering up tips for how affiliate marketers can use social media to grow their site. The thing with most affiliate marketing is that everyone is selling the same product, at the same price, with the same boring ass stock photos. If you’re going to grab the commission, you need to have something unique to offer.

You need authority, credibility and trustworthiness.

You get that by being an influence leader. You go where your customers are and start talking. Today’s social networks are all interconnected and bleed into one another, so it’s important that the message you’re putting out is consistent. You have a genuine presence and invest time in paying attention to your customers.

That’s how affiliate marketers can be successful in social media. And hell, that’s how you become successful in whatever you’re doing. Sounds simple, right?

And that completes our coverage of Day 2 of Affiliate Summit. Come back tomorrow to watch us finish it up. I’m gonna go hit the bar now.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Summit West – Day 2 Recap

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Summit West – Day 2 Recap

And since liveblogging is punishable by death in the Sugarrae household, below you’ll find a thought out recap of the sessions I attended for your reading pleasure.

May you go in peace.

Here were my top takeaways.

Your success will depend on your ability to locate the right opportunity.

In this morning’s Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Monetization session, speakers Andrew Wee, Miles Baker, Geordie Carswell and Nick Koscianski helped attendees learn to spot profitable affiliate opportunities. Each speaker agreed that you can’t just assume you know what’s going to be successful, because many times you’ll be completely wrong. You have to throw everything you can against the wall and see what sticks. You never know what will actually net you money until you try. Werd.

Nick, in particular, commented that his process for discovering successful affiliate ventures is to pick 5-10 things he thinks WON’T be successful…and then go after them full steam ahead. (It seems Nick has really bad judgment). Miles encouraged looking for situations where you can create a relationship with the vendor and to go after larger, less competitive areas. Don’t simply focus in on smaller niches assuming they’ll be easier to tackle. Often, they’re not. Geordie recommended using Google Insights to help you keep track of trends and to discover new areas on the verge of being hot.

Affiliate marketing is nothing more than building relationships with people.

The most important lesson being drilled into attendees today was that affiliate marketing is all about relationships. Without that personal connection, you have nothing.

It makes sense. As Andy Rodriguez said in his presentation during the Developing the Right Merchant Mindset panel, affiliate marketing is based on freedom. It’s the set your own hours, report to yourself business model that the Web always promised us. In the world of affiliate marketing, these affiliates are not your employees. They don’t work for you; they with you. And they can leave at any time and decide to send business to a competitor. In order to prevent them from doing that, you need to make yourself available to them and establish that close relationship.

Something else that struck me today was the idea that just because you sell shoes, doesn’t mean you’re only competing against other shoe merchants. You’re not. You’re competing against all merchants with an affiliate program. And what’s going to make you stand out and make you the person people keep want to interact with? The relationships you form from the very beginning. That means when you send out that initial approval letter, make sure it’s customized and that it promotes the goals you’re after. Give them multiple ways of contacting you.

You can’t force or buy these relationships. They have to be developed over the course of time, but once they’re established, they’re very often lifelong. Invest in building the relationship and the sales will follow. Remember, you need them more than they need you.

There are different ways to be successful.

During the Monetization panel, many of the panelists argued that the way to be successful was to be unique. What do you offer that your competition doesn’t? Why would someone want to do business with you?

Geordie commented that he tries to make himself unique by writing his own content. If you want to stand out, trying straying away from text-based content and play around with video and audio. Be the one who’s being copied instead of the one copying. There’s a certain amount of best practices that everyone will follow – strong calls to action, using good color layouts, etc. – but after that, you can’t copy results because you don’t know what’s really working for someone else. That AdWord’s page you see your competition using could be the one they just split tested and found out performs worse than their others. You don’t know. Be original.

Or….don’t. Nick joked that he knows a lot of people who make great livings off of having no original thought and simply copying other people’s stuff. Geordie calls those people rat bastards. ;)

….but your pitch is everything.

When you’re an affiliate trying to get your brand or site exposure, your pitch is everything. The Ultimate Pitching Guide session had speakers Peter Shankman, Anita Campbell, Jim Kukral and Lisa Picarille detailing what goes into to creating a really great pitch.

• Get To The Point: A good pitch is about two things – brevity and relevance. If a blogger or journalist doesn’t know what the email is about in the first 5 seconds, they’re either going to delete it or ignore it. Don’t give them that chance. Show them why it’s important in the first few sentences. If you can establish yourself as someone who doesn’t waste time, it will help you create great relationships for the future.

• Know Who You’re Pitching To: For God’s sake, customize your pitch. Know the magazine or the blog you’re going after. Who is their readership? What’s their angle? What types of stories do they normally cover? By spinning things the right way you show them why it’s appropriate to them. Don’t make them have to figure out why your story would be good for them. In most cases, they won’t invest that much time.

• Treat People A Little Better Than Crap: Peter identified himself as the cynical bastard of the group and hailed that people expect to be treated like crap. According to Peter, if you treat people a little above crap, they’ll be grateful. If you treat them good, they’ll be lifelong fans. You don’t have to be great, you just have to be better than everyone else. Read what the reporter wants and give it to them in under three paragraphs. That will get you above the crap and into the news.

• Present Yourself As An Expert: Create a niche for yourself. Be the go-to person for X-related stories. Engage with the blogs/news outlets in that niche. Before you ask them to write about you, name drop them in your own blog. Many times they’ll have a Google Alert set up for their name and they’ll spot it. This puts you in their top of mind recall.

When you make a pitch, have a specific story in mind. It’s easier to get into blogs than mainstream journalist (were the bloggers just insulted?) because it’s more relationship-based and that can be easier to form. Go to their blog and start leaving comments there. Get involved in the community. Then, when you send an email to that blogger, they’ll recognize who you are and you’ll have the door open a little ways. Invest in the relationships before you need them.

Recognize the value of social media and use it to your advantage. Social media lets you screw up to a much broader group of people. You should be trying social media and letting people interact with you. Try uStream. Try Twitter. Be on LinkedIn and Facebook. These sites let the masses issue your press release for you.

The struggles affiliate marketers face

During the Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Monetization panel, the speakers were asked to share the biggest problem they’re currently facing and what they’re doing to overcome it. The audience was treated to some pretty awesome answers.

Miles shared that his biggest concern is scaling and growing his business. He noted to compensate for that he outsources a lot of his work and hires virtual employees. This, of course, creates another problem of having to manage people so he tries to create a system for everything that they do in order to eliminate any extra work and help streamline things.

Nick’s biggest concern is always trying to stay ahead of the curve. There are so many new people getting into affiliate marketing that there’s always more and more competition. To stay ahead you have to stay motivated. That’s the biggest thing – putting in more effort than anyone else. Most of the people in this stuff are lazy. Keep testing. Keep innovating. Nothing lasts forever. Always be trying new things.

Geordie is struggling with time management. It’s hard to balance the stuff that makes lots of money with the stuff that’s at all fun to work on. It’s usually the boring stuff that makes a lot of money. A big part of this is to try and find out what’s worth your time and how you want to live. He thinks there’s a lot of blog reading that goes on. Hell, you can be a professional blog reader and never do anything if you wanted to. But while you’re doing that and trying to learn, someone else is acting and making money.

Put together, I think these gentlemen just described my three biggest problems in life! And that’s it from Affiliate Summit on Day 1. We’ll be back tomorrow with Day 2’s highlights.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Summit West – Day 1 Recap

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Affiliate Summit West – Day 1 Recap

When I say that I wrote out my business plan and posted it on my blog in that post, I’m not kidding. And that statement is still true today. Yet, even though I gave out my business plan, I’d bet I can count on one hand those who actually used it to full value.

When I discuss advanced affiliate marketing, I often suggest creating affiliate brands instead of affiliate sites, as I did in that post 18 months ago:

Start buying brandable and not keyword laden domains. If you can include a keyword, great, but branding is important and neccessary.

Differentiate yourself and add value. Let’s get one thing straight. Google doesn’t hate affiliate sites. Google hates shit affiliate sites. Treat your affiliate site like any “real business” and develop a point of difference.

The point of difference thing is something I’m asked about often. The point of difference is essentially your brand. By creating a point of difference, you’re creating a brand and branding is often what seperates the affiliate men from the boys (so to speak). I go a little into the difference between an affiliate site and an affiliate brand a during part of the video below:

Some “Famous” Affiliate Brands

Most people don’t realize that some of the bigger brands on the web are nothing more than affiliate sites… with a point of difference.

Lower My Bills

Lower My Bills offers folks the ability to try and lower their household bills by offering information and “quotes” on everything from cell phone service to auto insurance.

Lower My Bills started out as nothing more than an affiliate site and grew to become a brand featured in many national publications that now employs a full time staff and even runs their own affiliate program (hint, their volume is so high, they can demand higher rates from merchants than you can get as an “regular affiliate” – they pass those higher rates on to you but keep a portion of the difference).

Lower My Bills sells cellular phones through the PhoneDog.com affiliate program and offers auto insurance quotes as an affiliate of Geico and Progressive.

The site has hundreds of pages of unique content and at the time it was rising to fame, had taken a point of difference of being a site where you could “lower your household bills” instead of being yet another site you could buy a cell phone from. According to Compete.com, variations of their brand name accounts for three of their top ten search phrases and the word “lowermybills” gets 10K searches a month according to the approx avg search volume listed for the phrase in the Google Adwords keyword tool.

Even with 20,000 links, an Alexa rank of 20K and the ability to say they’re owned by Experian, Lower My Bills is still at its core, still an affiliate site.

Epinions / Shopping.com

Epinions (owned by Shopping.com) and the actual Shopping.com site both pretty much sell everything under the sun, all through affiliate links. Essentially, Epinions and Shopping.com are both online mall datafeed sites, using the same feed arranged a bit differently.

For Epinions, their core point of difference from every other “online mall” was user generated content (before it was all the rage) in the form of product reviews left by consumers. That was and still for the most part is, all that separated them from any other affiliate who took every affiliate feed they could find (or Shopping.com’s own available feed) and mashed them all together into one massive online mall.

The core point of difference for Shopping.com, is well, its domain name. Sometimes you can work for a POD, sometimes you can simply purchase it (ok, and they also have a few in depth buying guides).

Shopping.com and Epinions are two nearly identical affiliate feed sites, but because they have branded themselves (being owned by eBay probably doesn’t hurt either, but remember, they didn’t start out with that) as the top destination for shopping (Shopping.com) and product reviews (Epinions), they’re able to rank healthily in Google.

Shopping.com has a top 500 Alexa rank and according to compete.com, variations of their domain name (with the .com in it) are two of their top three referrers (though Google shows “not enough data” when you do a search on shopping.com, Google also shows “not enough data” when you do a search on Google.com too).

Epinions has an Alexa rank of 2K and according to compete.com, variations of their brand epinions are three of their top four keywords and the word “epinions” gets 165K searches a month according to the approx avg search volume listed for the phrase in the Google Adwords keyword tool.

Not bad for a couple of (and nearly identical) affiliate datafeed mashup sites.

Bankrate

One of the most respected sites in the financial field, Bankrate branded itself by providing fantastic content on a level that wasn’t common when they started doing so. Like most good sites, Bankrate isn’t solely dependent on one income stream or even one income style. They make money via CPM advertisements, contextual advertising and, yep, affiliate programs.

Bankrate’s entire credit card section is nothing more than an affiliate feed of the NCS Reporting yet their doorway to those affiliate listings has zero problem ranking in Google for competitive terms.

Bankrate has an Alexa rank of 2200 and according to compete.com, variations of their brand bankrate are their two top keywords and the word “bankrate” gets 301K searches a month according to the approx avg search volume listed for the phrase in the Google Adwords keyword tool. Publicly traded, Bankrate has 160+ employees, does over 80 million a year in revenue and yes, Bankrate is also an affiliate marketer.

Advanced Affiliate Marketing

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with what the sites above have done for themselves and the fact that they are affiliates in no way demeans their brand or success. Hell, I work daily to try and achieve the same success they have by building up various brands of my own. But this is what I mean when I say “branded affiliate sites” or discuss “advanced affiliate marketing”. Working to differentiate your site, add value and create a brand.

Of course, these are extreme success stories (and proof that yes, Virginia, you can not only make an income, but you can support and entire company on affiliate marketing), but there is no reason you can’t create the next extreme success story. And even if you can only create the next “medium” or “small” success story, it will still be a lucrative story to tell.

The important thing to realize is that affiliate marketing has evolved. You’re going to need to learn how to evolve with it and how to create an affiliate brand, even if it is a small brand if you want to stay viable and have a place in the future online world.

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Examples in Affiliate Branding

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

Examples in Affiliate Branding

This post originated at the Sugarrae online marketing blog, home to online marketing consultant Rae Hoffman.

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