5 Tips for a Site Design Makeover

5 Ways to Update Aging Sites

ROI Tips for Affiliates

Test New Niches

Nov

17

Test Out These Niches in Q4

Filed Under Main Content | Leave a Comment

New niche merchants are launching new affiliate programs every day. With a good Wordpress theme and some articles from an outsourcer, you can build out a small niche site in a matter of a few days.

So why not test out a few new niches during Q4? With seasonal shopping just around the corner, the time is ripe for building sites in niches that always see lots of traffic during the winter holidays:

Food Baskets

Flower Delivery

Chocolate Gifts

Jewelry & Watches

Electronic Gadgets

MP3 Players

High-Tech Cell Phones

Home Theater - TVs, DVD Player/Recorders, etc.

Keepsake Gifts

Religious Gifts

Movies, Books, Music

Toys for Infants, Toddlers, and Young Children

Gifts for Women, Men, Boys, Girls, Teens, and Seniors

Gifts for Co-Workers, Bosses, and Clients

When exploring a new niche, you don’t have to get overly ambitious. A small site of 10-15 pages is enough to test the waters. The trick is to choose good long tail keywords, drive initial traffic with articles or PPC, and (most important) be sure to track your results.

In fact, Q4 is also the perfect time to launch sites in niches that get hot in the post-Christmas season. These niches include:

Accounting Software - The start of a new year means a new accounting year, the perfect time to promote accounting software and other types of financial software.

Tax Preparation - January 1 through April 15 is the height of tax season. Be sure to check for information products, in addition to software and CPA offers.

Debt Management - The post-holiday spending “hangover” means more traffic to sites dealing with credit counseling and getting out of debt. This is a great niche for CPA offers.

Dieting, Exercise, and Fitness - Everyone puts on a few pounds during the holidays, so offer solutions to the millions who make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight.

Next… give your sites a makeover!

Other posts in this series:

5 Ways to Update Aging Sites

ROI Tips for Affiliates

Nov

14

5 Ways to Update “Aging” Sites

Filed Under Main Content | Leave a Comment

It’s no news that the major search engines will often give sites with constantly refreshed content an edge — hence the popularily of blogs for marketing. In a very real sense, “relevance” has a lot to do with timeliness. A recently updated site certainly appears more up-to-date than a page built at the turn of the millenium.

But refreshed content isn’t just for the search engines. Visitors like it, too. Updates provide surfers with a reason to bookmark your site. That encourages repeat visits and more click throughs.

So during Q4, why not make a plan for adding or changing a few things to any sites that you haven’t updated for a while? Here are some ideas that are relatively quick and easy:

1 - Add an RSS feed. Blogs automatically include an RSS feed, but you can add RSS to any site by adding some simple code. A service like RSSPECT makes it simple. Be sure to encourage visitors to sign up for your feed.

2 - Add more content. Simply write 10-20 good articles, or outsource them to a freelancer. Do some SEO duty at the same time by researching keywords to use in your articles. The Google Keyword Tool is a great place to do this research (be sure to check the “Synonyms” box to get ideas for long tail keywords.

3 - Modify colors or layouts. You don’t need to do a complete website overhaul. Just changing the page or table backgrounds, adding a few well-placed graphics, or modifying the color of headline fonts can give your website a fresh look. It’s easy to experiment with color or font changes if your site uses an external stylesheet. If you’re not familiar with stylesheets, this CSS tutorial can help.

4 - Add or update products. If you have some mini-sites that run more or less on autopilot, consider using them to test some new product offerings. If these sites promore physical products, consider adding some complementary information products from ClickBank.

5 - Add an opt-in box and build a list. Even sites that target very small niches can increase profitabliity with an opt-in list. In fact, small lists can actually be extremely responsive. If you have a blog, Aweber allows you to email your list automatically when you add posts, as well as build lists on conventional websites.

Next… Try a new niche!

Other posts in this series:

ROI Tips for Affiliates

Nov

12

Be a Better Affiliate - November AC Magazine

Filed Under Main Content | Leave a Comment

“Be a Better Affiliate” is the theme of the November issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine, with articles that focus on ethical principles, time management skills, white hat SEO, and golden rules for building a successful business.

Here are some excerpts from this month’s articles:

From An Affiliate Code of Honor

“How can you write a review of a product if you haven’t bought it?” I usually answer along these lines:

If you go to a Ferrari garage, does all the sales staff in the garage own Ferraris? Or, if you go to a clothing shop, does the sales assistant own every article in the shop? No, they don’t, but they can advise you about the pros and cons of any particular car or garment; and that is what you should do as an affiliate.

When you write a review of a product that you don’t own, stick to the facts. Tell the reader about the author or manufacturer, and tell them what they receive when they purchase. Mention the different sizes or colors. Glean as many facts from the sales page or other reviews and include them in your review. Never pretend you own a product if you don’t.

From Ten Time Management Tips for Affiliates

Tip #2: Set Goals and Tight Deadlines

You are the boss now, but along with the perks come the responsibility. Nobody (meaning you) is going to get anything done unless the boss (yes, you again) is setting goals and deadlines.

Think of your projects as something that you’re outlining for an employee. What should they accomplish? How much time should it take them? When should they show results? Use this as your guideline to get things done.

In fact, challenge yourself to beat the goals and exceed expectations. You probably did that for your last boss – give yourself the same respect.

From White Hat, Black Hat: The Affiliate Dilemma, Solved

Black hat techniques can be practical, but almost always just in the short run. You might be clever enough to use a particular shady technique and make some money. But you run a very high risk of being banned, or at least detected by the program that processes what the spiders find. (Google ain’t dumb, I’m sure we can all agree.) Think about what that means for a minute.

You paid for a domain name and spent a long time and tons of effort (or at least a lot of money getting someone else to) build a website. You did it to make money as an affiliate, a noble goal. But abusing the search engine guidelines in a blatant way can put you out of business in a heartbeat. At the very least, your approach might be counter-productive. You can wind up with a lower rank than you might have otherwise.

From Ten Rules of Successful Affiliate Marketing

Rule #2: Be Honest

Today’s web surfers aren’t naïve. As a matter of fact, they look with a jaded eye very often. They expect dishonesty, so you must provide them with absolute honesty.

Don’t promote products that you don’t believe in yourself.
Don’t load your website down with advertisements.
Do provide honest and accurate content.

Remember that website visitors rarely make a purchase on their first website visit. You have to first convince them to come back again, and you do that by being honest and inspiring their trust.

Want to read more? Download “Be a Better Affiliate,” the November issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine today!

Nov

11

ROI Tips for Affiliate Marketers

Filed Under Main Content | Leave a Comment

You hear it over and over again: the most successful online marketers test everything and track everything. So why aren’t you? Tracking ROI isn’t just for affiliates who buy traffic. With a little ingenuity, you can actually track ROI for all types of marketing.

The first step, though, to is be sure you actualy undertand the formula for calculating ROI. Here’s the rough but simple one we use at Affiliate Classroom:

(Gross Affiliate Commissions - Expenses) / Expenses x 100

As you can see, you’re basically:

* Subtracting your expenses from your revenue. That gives you your net profits.

* Diving your net profits by your expenses and multiplying by 100 to turn it into a percentage (that’s what the “x 100″ is for).

Depending on the type of marketing you’re doing, here’s what some typical ROI calculation might look like:

PPC Campaign

($3750 Gross Commissions - $1400 Ad Spend = $ 2350 Net Profits

$ 2350/ $1400 x 100 = 167% ROI

Article Marketing Campaign

$1850 Gross Commissions - $625 Outsource Expense = $1225 Net Profits

$1225 / $625 x 100 = 196% ROI

Email Marketing Campaign

$4875 Gross Commissions - $2150 Campaign Costs = $2725 Net Profits

$2725 / $2150 = 126% ROI

Of course, to calculate ROI you need data - specifically data on your expenses and your conversions. Tracking expenses is relatively simple with PPC, since it’s easy enough to see exactly how much you are spending on ads for every campaign.

But for article marketing, email marketing, and other forms of online marketing (such as blog or forum marketing), it’s vital that you develop a way to measure the cost of intangibles, such as the time you spend writing articles or managing JVs. (Read our article on “Do You Know How Much Your Articles Are Worth?” for ideas on how to track the return on your article marketing.)

To track conversions, the ideal secanrio is to work with merchants who support conversion tracking. These merchants will set up your AdWords or other conversion tracking code on the “thank you” page, making it ultra simple for you.

But realistically, many merchants still don’t support conversion tracking, so you’ll need to use a third party tracking tool. Hypertracker is inexpensive and easy to set up, and if you take advantage of all of its features, it can actually calculate your return on each campaign.

Over and over again, we see affiliates starting new campaigns in new niches without trying to improve the conversions on their existing sites. Yet it’s not that difficult to achieve significant growth in sales, IF you know which links, ads, and campaigns result in the most sales. It usually takes less time to take those under-performing campaigns and remodel them after your winners.

So if you need motivation, simply ask yourself whether you’d like to sell twice as much as you do right now with a minimal amount of additional effort. In most cases it’s much easier to optimize an existing campaign — by tweaking your landing pages, headlines, ad copy, titles, and resource boxes — than to start and test a new campaign from scratch.

Next in this series… update those “aging” sites!

Other posts in this series: