Place Banners Prominently – display the best performing creatives, use banners with coupon codes, hyperlink text in posts
Capture Visitor Data – Newsletter sign-ups (aweber), Facebook connect, RSS, Twitter, Facebook Fans. Then you can market to those users by sending deals, promotions, and coupons.
Calls-to-Action – Merchant reviews, Product recommendations. Content doesn’t have to “sell” the merchant.
Pay-Per-Call – Get paid for generating 800 number calls.
Promote Coupon Codes – Exclusive coupons, Vanity coupons, monthly expiring deals, replace with new deals monthly/seasonal
Increase Your Chances to Convert – Experiment with banner placements, expect greatness from your Advertisers/Merchants

Get a niche site online quickly is essential to allowing yourself the ability to post content and articles online and generate traffic. Here are a few tips on getting your niche website online fast:

- Use available content management platforms – build WordPress sites with custom themes then add affiliate banners
- Host multiple sites or blogs or use free hosting – Free site builders, Blogger.com, WordPress.com.
- Add Plug-ins to improve functionality – SEO, Social Networking, Bookmarking
- Leverage Product Feeds – Feature select products from Merchant catalog. (PopShops, Datafeedfile, Datafeedr, Amazon)

Once you have launched your niche site you can start the process of building out the content and growing your site larger and larger, which will generate more organic traffic over time.

Niche affiliate site building is a great strategy because it’s basically free and will allow you to publish content to the Internet and rank organically in order to generate traffic and affiliate commissions. Here are some of the reason why niche site building is a good strategy:

- Allows you to focus on a theme and run with it – craft your site’s content easier in a niche you are familiar with.
- Visitors like themed sites in their favorite niches (ex. pets, parenting, dating, gardening).
- Builds up a following of like-minded individuals – Email list, RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook Fans, Bookmarks
- Great opportunity for community building – Forum, Social Network (Ning.com)

These are but a few good reasons for building niche affiliate sites. Let me know what you think!

Hello everyone! Very exciting news…we have just added SexyWearAvenue as a client on the Shareasale Affiliate Network. SexyWearAvenue is a great performing website that pays out 10% commission rate on all affiliate referred sales. Make sure to jump on it in time for Halloween and all year round sexy outfit sales. Let me know if you need anything at all to promote this great affiliate program. We look forward to working with you on the project! Thanks!

I just returned from Affiliate Summit East in NYC and it was a great time. It was really nice to run into a bunch of people I know in the affiliate marketing industry as well as meet new people. I really got the feeling that people respect my opinion on their projects and want to work with me and get my feedback, which is nice. I had some really great meetings with some of our affiliate/publishers and met some others that I just ran into. Dinner with the fine folks from eCoupons.com was fantastic and some great ideas were discussed about expanding our relationship. I attended some really good sessions, most notably on Social media for affiliate marketers which I learned a few things from. The parties were pretty good too, at least the ones I attended, especially the Google part on the Hudson Terrace, that was totally nice. There were tons of pretty ladies from around the industry which always makes it more fun, let’s be honest lol. I had a ridiculously amazing dinner at Le Bernardin with Alexis Caldwell of surfmyads.com, who was smart, funny and gorgeous…it was funny because they gave me a blue blazer to wear which was cool. My speaking session on Sunday was great! It was a totally packed house and I tried to bring a lot of my knowledge and strategies to the table, so I hope it came out well (video will be available soon). The feedback I got was good and probably 20 people waited to speak to me afterwards. Then walking around a bunch of people told me I was their favorite session and they learned a lot, so that made me feel good. I hope the feedback gets back to Shawn and Missy so they allow me to speak at more events in the future. Everything was great with the show and it was cool to be in NYC for a few days to get away from the office and my computer! My fingers are refreshed and I’m ready to really crush the week and follow-up with everyone I met at the show. Thanks for reading feel free to share it, like it, and Digg it!

Hello all! I hope you had a great weekend. So, very exciting news! I was recently added to the vaunted Speaker List for Affiliate Summit East Sunday, August 15th. Very, very excited. Was working on my presentation this weekend and it’s going to be great. It’s called: Niche Website Building and Content Strategies.” I hope to see all the Affiliate/Publishers we know at my session so we can meet after and chat. I plan to be very informative and relate all the best free online marketing strategies I know to generate affiliate traffic and commissions. I look forward to seeing all of you in New York!

Thanks,
- Evan

Affiliate marketing is probably 80 to 90% of performance based marketing. Affiliate marketing has been around for over 10 years and it really just started as a way to compensate referrers who are sending business through to various types of websites. It actually started in the adult space, but it quickly grew into the mainstream space and a lot of it has evolved with various networks and tracking platforms. So what should you do as a merchant or advertiser looking to launch into affiliate marketing? You should launch on a major network. If you are a merchant or a website owner and you are selling products or generating leads, you should launch on one of the major networks if not more than one.

Recruiting Affiliates – this is one of the biggest question marks as to how and methodology. Recruiting affiliates is really easy if you know how. You have to do a lot of pro-active reaching out, contacting websites, contacting known affiliates…doing it very tastefully and offering them some benefit of working with your company, otherwise you just become one of the thousands of companies vying for their time, which is why it’s important to differentiate yourself by standing out from your competitors. another way to recruit affiliates is to advertise online. You can advertise in Google and Yahoo under “affiliate program” keywords. You can advertise on forums and in places where affiliates frequent in order to recruit affiliates to either your affiliate signup page or directly to one of your affiliate network signup pages.

Managing Affiliates – This is one of my favorite phrases: “Management is everything.” If you launch an affiliate program or a performance marketing channel and you don’t have intensive management behind it, it’s likely not going to gain traction unless you are a huge Fortune 500 retailer that’s never done affiliate marketing before, then it might grow on its own. But otherwise, it needs a lot of doting upon and lots of TLC. You need proactive affiliate management, this is what our company does. Whomever handles your affiliate management, or is working with your partners, needs to do a very intensive job and really take it extremely seriously, it really is a seven day a week type of process.

Affiliate Payout Levels – payout levels have got to be looked at frequently and you should look to payout as much as you can and make it lucrative for your affiliate/publishers. You should also look to throw in some kind of incentives and say, “if you make 50 sales this month or even 10 sales this month, we are going to give you a $100 bonus,” or we are going to give you an iPad or an iPod or pay more now. Pay as much as you can initially and then you can reserve a couple of percentage points for people who can produce serious amounts of volume.

Don’t be Cheap with your Affiliates and Partners – this is one of the biggest mistakes companies make. They really just don’t reward people well enough and they kind of look at it as just another other channel and say, “I really don’t need to payout much because it’s just, I don’t know what it’s going to do.” Wrong attitude! You really should look at it as a real sales force as your online “feet on the street” so to speak and you need to make it lucrative for people to work with you.

Affiliate and Partner Management – personalization works best. Typically, personalized affiliate management always works better than a mass approach, but you have to have experienced people in order leverage personalized affiliate management preoperly.

Affiliate Network Choice – one network versus many networks. This is a common issue in performance marketing because the more you spread out your offer or your advertiser account onto several networks, the more management has to come behind it and then you have to make sure the same order isn’t being credited to more than one network source. So it can actually have problems when you branch it out a little bit wider with more networks. So I usually recommend maximizing one network and then maybe trying a couple others when you want to add more volume if there are additional partners you can pick up there.

Want your Affiliates to Succeed – make it worth their time, make it worth their efforts, if you just look at as just another campaign, then don’t even bother because you really have to put a lot of love into it, blood, sweat, and tears in order to get the most out of your performance marketing in your affiliate channel. Facilitating your affiliates and partners with good management, with tools, with resources, with providing them content, original content, about your company, keywords, non-trademark keywords or even trademark keywords depending on your stance, to let them succeed and market effectively.

Strategize on Growing your Affiliate Channel – don’t just sit there and kind of let it happen, you know, every month you should be putting a new strategy together…”what are we going to be doing in August”, what are we doing in September, what are we doing for Q4 to maximize this our affiliate channel? Are we going to pay out a little more or are we going to do recruiting campaign? Are we going to run new promotions? So you really have to strategize pretty heavily and leverage experts. Leverage people who you decide can really help you in this endeavor and they are out there, you just have to find them and meet them and talk to them. contact us to further discuss the key aspects of affiliate marketing for Advertisers and Merchants!

There are many different third party “affiliate tracking programs” to use to run your affiliate program on, such as: LinkShare, Commission Junction, and ShareASale…probably being the top three. Then there are the multitudes of CPA networks, which operate on various platforms, and you can include your offer or your website in their networks as well.

The main difference between CPA networks and what I call major affiliate networks, like CJ, LinkShare, and ShareAsale, is the publisher transparency issue, in that you don’t necessarily know who the publishers are driving traffic to your offer through CPA networks. Whereas on a major affiliate network, you have all the affiliate contact data and you know exactly who’s driving you traffic and sales, so you can easily go check-up on the producers and monitor it really closely.

The major affiliate networks tend to have more overall numbers of affiliates and partners, because they’ve been doing it for 8 or 10 plus years. Some of the smaller CPA networks just haven’t been around that long so they don’t have the sheer affiliates and publishers that you can partner with. Problem is, most new merchants getting into performance marketing are like baby Einsteins…they are beaming with energy but they are like a clueless baby. Most new Advertisers getting into affiliate marketing are unrealistic about how quickly their affiliate channel can grow. It’s a long-term strategy with short-term gains along the way. If managed properly, your affiliate program should grow monthly over month and year over year, ebbing and flowing with your traditional seasonality.

It can be really tricky picking exactly which affiliate tracking platform you want to go on as a company. I usually recommend choosing one of the “major affiliate networks”, and maybe a couple of “CPA networks” to test out to see how the quality is. Using an internal affiliate tracking platform like HasOffers can be beneficial to working with Affiliates directly. HasOffers is very affordable and it can handle all your internal onsite tracking of your partners, affiliates, and online campaigns.

As an Advertiser, you need monitor very closely what’s going on on these networks, i.e. what kind of sales you are getting, are the numbers are matching up to your back-end numbers, and who is generating the traffic and sales. There has to be some real management internally just to make sure the orders coming in, and the leads coming in, are matching up to what the numbers are reflecting on these other networks, to make sure you aren’t double paying for the same order or lead.

So those are your basic options for affiliate tracking platforms. If you would like to speak to a knowledgeable, experienced person about your affiliate network options, just give us a shout. Thanks!

Hey everyone, I hope you’re having a great week so far! It’s back-to-school time and most of our Advertisers are running coupon code promotions for their Affiliate/Publishers. We have updated our Google Spreadsheet with the latest coupon codes and their expiration dates. If you need to be sent a pending offer for any of our affiliate programs on CJ, Shareasale, Linkshare, and Google Network, please let us know and we will do it right away. These affiliate coupons are great to promote through your sites, blogs, and through your social networking on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure to always include your affiliate tracking link when you are promoting in order to get credit for your sales. You can use Bit.ly to shorten your affiliate tracking link. Let us know if you have any questions at all about our back-to-school affiliate coupon deals! We look forward to hearing from you.