Buzzwords, Incentive, Choice and Brands

• Posted by Brent on May 8, 2008 15:09
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I worked in sales for almost 7 years before finishing college and starting work as a programmer. I sold computers at Radio Shack for a short time, before taking a job selling doors, windows, kitchen cabinets, and appliances at a home improvment center. I was #3 in sales in my region when I worked at Radio Shack, and I sold the crap out of doors when I worked at Menards.  In those 7 years I learned a lot about how to sell things to people. I learned how to sell things to people that they didn't need or plan on buying beforehand. All of the things I learned in retail sales can be applied to affiliate marketing!

Buzzwords

I mentioned i was a top salesman selling computers when I worked at Radio Shack. How did I do it? Buzzwords. At that time "IBM Compatible" was a HUGE buzzword in the compter industry (LOL). I used that to my full advantage. At that time, at Radio Shack we sold IBM PC's. In order to sell MASS computers I gave people my standard pitch. Then what sent them over the edge into buy buy buy mode was to use the buzzword. I would tell them "These aren't IBM Compatible computers, they ARE IBM computers". Bam. Cheesy as hell, but it worked like a charm. That sentence made me a lot of money in sales commission. That same idea can be applied to affiliate marketing. Think about your niche, compile a list of buzzwords, and split test your landing pages to find which buzzwords convert to sales.

Incentive

Another important thing in retail sales is incentive. Now I mentioned I sold doors at Menards, but I didn't tell you that sometimes, the store actually LOSES money on a door sale. Now why is this? Why would they sell a product for less than it costs them to buy/make? Incentive, that is why. They can take that $18 pre-hung door that costs them $21 to make and splash it all over their ads in newspapers, on TV and on the radio. That brings people through the doors and onto the sales floor. Now your sales people can sell them the door, but also sell them paint, shims, sandpaper, a knob, nails, stain, and a hammer to install the door with. That is where the profit is!

In affiliate marketing there are incentivized offers. You can use do those, but I am saying to use this form of incentive a different way. Use it to increase your CTR (click through rate) on your PPC ads! The offer you are promoting (ie. the doors, knobs and shim) may not be free, but you can certainly offer your OWN free product (ie. the door) on your landing page in addition to the real product, which is the affiliate offer. That's gold money right there.

Next time, I will discuss 2 more retail sales concepts that can be used in affiliate marketing. Choice and Brands. 

It even smells like the letter F

• Posted by Brent on March 6, 2008 18:53
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Another Adwords Disadvantage For Affiliates

• Posted by Brent on March 6, 2008 18:35
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Google continues to roll out changes to their quality score that put affiliates at a disadvantage. I don't think they are purposefully trying to push affiliates out of Adwords. Affiliates make them a ton of money. But as always their #1 focus is on customer experience. 

 The latest post on the Official Adwords blog indicates page load time is a soon-to-come factor in their Quality Score algo. This is a fairly significant disadvantage for affililates. Most affiliate links have to be pushed through several different URL's so the click can be tracked by all parties before the final page is loaded .  Here is what it looks like for some of my clicks:

 1. Click on google.com

2. User is sent to my server so I can record the click and replace the keyword with my keword ID -> redirect to affiliate link (let's say to Commission Junction)

3. Commission Junction's page loads, records the necessary data and sends the request on to the merchant

4. The request finally hits the merchant site, but they too have a url to record the click. They record their data and finally ..

5. The true landing page loads.

 That's a lot of redirects (5 different URL's on 4 domains in one click)! That's a slow loading page no matter how many dual-cores you have pushing clicks. Crap this sucks. Profit margins for affiliates are getting tighter and tighter on Adwords.

Super Easy .NET Scraping

• Posted by Brent on February 23, 2008 13:02
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Automated screen scraping is great way to get fresh data into your network of money making sites (duh) and into your PPC campaigns without spending all your time updating sites.  The HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse objects fit the bill well for just such scraping (thank you Microsoft).  ASP.NET Library has a handy little article that sums it up well. They've also got another little sweet nugget of code that'll pull an HTML table of any page and dump it in a .NET dataset. Once you get the data in a DataSet it's putty in your hands (aka money in your wallet). Use that code against any page that displays data in a table and you own it. You don't have to look far to find money making data in an html table.  Cha-ching.

 Also,  want to scrape email dropped in your Outlook mail client? Take a peek at Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MailItem in the Outlook Object Model. Sweetness.