A Fresh Twist to Affiliate Marketing

If you’ve ever ventured into affiliate marketing, you already know the routine:

Pick a product to become an affiliate of, create a website with related content, and insert affiliate banners and links, enticing visitors to click on those links, and hopefully make a purchase so that you can earn a commission.

Honestly, some more considerations need to be made up front and you should be realistic with yourself as to how successful you can be with your approach.

First of all, read the terms of service of the affiliate program you are signing up with, and if you have any questions about those terms and conditions, contact their affiliate support department and get a clear cut answer before taking any action that could wind up getting you banned from the affiliate program. Why? First of all, if you get banned, you’re not going to get a payout, regardless of how many customers you brought them, and secondly, if the affiliate program provides for residual commissions when the person renews their service, etc., then you are really taking a big risk with what could be a good bit of residual income.

Once you know the dos and don’ts of the affiliate program, review their payment options and how long of a waiting period there is before a given commission clears the probationary “pending” stage and is actually available to be withdrawn. Also, check what the minimum payout amount is.

Now that you have gotten the lay of the land, here’s the twist. Instead of marketing your website online, or hoping to land a top spot in Google for a niche keyword term, advertise the site locally. I know this may sound backwards, but consider that you can actually have an impact locally, much easier than you can with respect to the entire online community. Also, from a niche keyword standpoint, tossing in a city name, or even a state name, may put you in a very easy niche of Google SERP competition. I know that also means a lower amount of exact match keyword searches, but tests have proven that one extra word in an exact match domain doesn’t really have any negative effect. For instance, if your website is “buywidgets.com” or “buywidgetsnow.com,” your website URL still contains all of the words from the search, and if you choose a brand-like URL instead of an exact match approach, the title of your website and internal URLs become the replacement for an exact match domain name.

So, how can you go about marketing locally? Think about the product you are marketing, and create a website in which the affiliate product is needed in tandem with the actual topic matter. For instance, if you create a website with listings of cars for sale, sign up as an affiliate of car insurance companies, and auto loan companies. Then, you can focus on bringing great content to the website for your visitors, instead of your focus being on pushing content about the affiliate product. If someone comes to a site to read about car loans, sure, they might apply for a car loan, but more often, they’re in a “getting educated” mode, not a buying mode. In fact, they probably haven’t even decided upon which car to attempt to purchase, so applying for a loan is a bit out of order. However, if they are browsing car listings, an ad offering an instant decision on an auto loan would be much more appealing, and will probably do fairly well if your traffic is targeted.

Consider your affiliate product, and put yourself in the shoes of your visitor. Ask yourself if you would click the affiliate link on your website, honestly. You don’t have to get too involved in masterminding the chain of events that lead to someone clicking your links, but take a basic walk through of when you personally would be in buying mode for the affiliate product you have to offer, and try to recreate that buying mode for your visitor. By positioning your website, content, and affiliate ads appropriately, you should have a naturally higher click through rate, and conversion rate.

The other great thing about this approach is that you don’t have to rank in Google for whatever it is you’re selling. For instance, consider trying to rank in Google for some keyword centered around auto loans, and then consider the difficulty in ranking for “cars for sale in city” or “cars for sale in state”, something along those lines. Now, you could do the same approach with a city or state name with auto loans, but you get the drift. The idea is to have a website NOT about what you’re selling.

One big mistake people make is what the “gurus” of affiliate marketing push in all of their info products. Pick a niche and an affiliate product, and try to match all of your info up to that affiliate product. While this approach makes sense, people get carried away by only focusing on being an affiliate, and not on providing good content to the visitor. Content is king, remember that.

Taking this approach widens the possibilities for affiliate marketers, because it releases you from the viewpoint that your website and content all have to be centered around your affiliate product. You will come to find that if your content is great, and your affiliate product complements your content well, you’ll get a lot more clicks based on people enjoying your content, then you will by creating an exact match keyword website focused on an affiliate product. People are not stupid, and will understand that you’re just pushing a product, which doesn’t mean you won’t make commissions, but it’s not going to earn you a lot of reputation points with your audience.

By putting the local spin on things, you can find a local audience, and then use traditional marketing methods alongside online marketing methods to increase the number of traffic streams to your website.

How Bounce Rate Affects SEO & Implications

One question I’ve seen popping up lately is whether or not bounce rate truly affects your position in SERPs. I’ve decided to weigh in on this subject with a different angle than simply answering that question.

First of all, from a technical standpoint, how this is engineered is interesting to me. Obviously, if you have Google Analytics, or Bing Webmaster Tools, installed, then it would be easy for that given search engine to know your bounce rate for any keyword in their index, however, let’s say that you use a different metrics system that isn’t affiliated with any search engine, how would Google or Bing know your bounce rate then? Honestly, I’m not 100% sure, but, I do not doubt that in some way, Google is gauging this metric, even if Analytics isn’t installed on the visited search result.

What does this mean for all of us website owners? Well, first of all, if this is true, it’s time to start putting a lot of thought into how to reduce bounce rates, as this metric will more than likely play a larger role in ranking SERPs as time goes on, simply because it is definitely a powerful statistic.

Think of the reasons why you “bounce” from a site when using a search engine. Obviously, if your website employs a tactic that causes you to bounce back, it might be a good time to consider an alternative to your approach on that component of your website.

Another interesting point here is Flash content. If the Flash content causes the visitor to bounce back, it’s not going to be good, however, if the Flash presentation is done well, perhaps it will lead to your website having an extremely low bounce rate, which moving forward could be huge for your SEO efforts. Flash is probably the single most controversial topic when it comes to web development, and especially in regard to SEO, so I’m sure as this becomes more and more prevalent, you will see people asking this same question more often.

In the world of online advertising, one recent method that is gaining steam is interstitial ads. These are usually full page ads, with a banner at the top that say “Skip” or “Continue to Content”, etc. I’m sure you’ve seen them. While as far as advertising revenue is concerned, interstitial ads seem like a good idea, if you implement them right off the bat and run up your bounce rate, this could affect your search engine ranking very adversely.

What users see “above the fold” is always important, but perhaps now is the time to breathe new life into the importance of grabbing your visitor’s attention and keeping it, above the fold. Also consider mobile visitors and how your website appeals to them. Perhaps you have a low bounce rate on traditional devices, and even tablets, but on handsets, your bounce rate is very high. You may be able to improve your SEO a great deal simply by offering a more attractive mobile version of your site.

If your website uses any media that is set to automatically play, you might want to reconsider your first words, as they may very well be your last. I’m not saying to take the used car dealership’s approach to radio advertisements and attempt to wake the dead, but beginning your video with “Hi, my name is John Doe and I’ve got some great news for you” might need to wait until you’re 20 or 30 seconds into the presentation.

If you’re an ecommerce site, one great way to keep people on your site at least for a few extra seconds is by placing a system wide advertisement at the top of the website. Chances are, if the visitor is even remotely interested when they click on your search result in Google, they’ll read what your sales promotion is, before clicking their back button, in the worst case scenario.

Also, engaging the user is a great way to attempt to hook them into staying on your site longer. Don’t be overly intrusive or bothersome, but the use of a content box that can be dismissed (not a popup, just a content box) somewhere above the fold that is highlighted and attempts to engage the user with a question and offer of a reward could be very successful in lowering your bounce rate.

For instance, perhaps you put up a system wide message in the header with a special offer of 10% off for new customers (returning customers will usually not have a high bounce rate), and then place a content box above the fold with a highlighted color border, with an offer such as, “Double your savings and receive 20% off on your first order!” with a question inside the box that they have to answer to receive the extra 10% off. Even if they do not complete checkout, they may answer your question (the question should provide you valuable information, think of a question that helps you resolve another issue on your website or gives you insight into why customers do or don’t do a particular action on your website). You could get really brave, and even offer the double discount amount for joining your mailing list and / or creating an account. Now you’re really engaging the customer, and if they have any interest, they’ll probably join your newsletter, create an account, and your bounce rate for their visit will be the best it can possibly be, a nice big goose egg.

As you can see, it makes sense to put thought into your bounce rate and how to lower it, as by doing so, you naturally come across other ways to improve your site for your visitors, and come up with new approaches to resolve other issues.

Premium WordPress Themes: Subscription Versus Single Purchase

If you’re in the market for a premium WordPress theme, or are “in the market” selling premium WordPress themes, there are two popular methods of offering a theme for purchase.

The first, and most popular method, is presenting the theme as a single purchase product, licensing the purchaser to use the theme in accordance with that license. The license may limit use of the theme to one website, or it may allow unlimited usage by the customer on as many websites as they like.

The second method, which is becoming more popular, is to offer a monthly subscription price, and granting usage rights to the subscriber for any theme included in the subscription.

Depending upon your needs, you’ll need to decide which of these approaches will work best for you.

In my experience, purchasing a single theme is the way to go if you are a niche website and find a premium WordPress theme specifically for your niche. For instance, if you’re a night club, and find a great night club theme, it would make sense to go with that theme, rather than purchasing some other premium theme or collection of themes, and then trying to bend that theme to your specific needs. I’m not saying this can’t be done, or won’t yield good results if done right, however, if you want to spend less time and money on development, using a quality theme specifically for your industry makes a lot of sense.

If you own various websites, and want them all to have a professional look, and they reside in various niches or areas of industry, then a subscription may be right for you. Believe it or not, many times the monthly subscription price is approximately equal to the average cost of a single premium theme. The only catch is, you’ll have to pay that monthly subscription each month to continue using your subscribed to premium themes. The monthly fee is one area which usually deters many single website owners from signing up for a theme subscription.

Money is always an issue, so let’s make some quick considerations for typical situations. If you’re the owner of a single site, purchasing a single theme makes the most sense. You’ll pay a one time fee for a theme, and if you decide that you want to move to a different theme later on, you’ll only have to pay another one time fee, and you’re done.

If you own various websites, a theme subscription website is a great solution, for the short term. Consider, however, that 3 years from now, you’ll still be forking out $39, or $49, or whatever the monthly subscription price is. Total up all of those fees, and you’ll quickly see that you could just as easily purchase a single premium theme for each site in your portfolio and save money. The catch is that you might not have enough cash to afford a premium theme for all of your sites up front, and you don’t want to rely on free themes. That’s perfectly understandable, so I would suggest getting a theme subscription, and slowly replacing your themes with single purchased premium themes. I would do this in the order of importance of the sites you own.

Consider the focus of each site, and honestly evaluate how it is coming along as far as fulfilling it’s potential. Perhaps the site is doing very well, or you may have discovered that the potential audience just isn’t interested in your topic, or, perhaps you lose passion to maintain a certain site. Be honest with yourself before purchasing a premium theme for a specific site. Pick a few sites that are doing very well, and that you are passionate about, and know you will be maintaining for months or years to come, and one by one, purchase premium themes for these sites, while using your theme subscription for the rest of your sites.

Undoubtedly, if you regularly purchase domains and setup new websites, the theme subscription will still be a relevant service to pay for, however, one by one, you’ll be getting a more specialized theme up and running on your most successful sites.

The idea is to maintain this approach until you’ve gotten premium themes on all of your successful sites.

The choice then is whether or not the theme subscription is still needed. I would consider the sites that I was still using themes from the subscription on, and honestly ask myself if the need was still there for a premium theme. If so, I would simply buy a premium theme for that site and put it on my list of sites to work hard to bring up to par in the success column.

The fact of the matter is, if the site isn’t achieving it’s intended purpose, and / or isn’t turning a profit, continually spending money on it doesn’t make sense. In fact, I would say the best thing to do in that case would be to either cut that project, or put some deep thought into how to turn the site around.

There is definitely value in theme subscription sites, however, I look at these marketplaces as a temporary fix. Utilizing them to improve the theme on a number of websites all at once is very useful, however, over time, the amount of money invested just doesn’t jive when considering that you could purchase another equally good theme for a one time fee, and it will probably be more specific to your niche or industry.

From a seller standpoint, I understand the theme subscription business model, however, at the end of the day, I think single theme sales will always trump subscription based businesses, simply because eventually, the customer will stop paying for their subscription, and when they do, all of their websites which were using those themes have to find a new theme. This is a terrible situation for the customer, especially given the fact that they’ve paid you for months, or perhaps even years, for those themes.

One thing I have not seen from a theme subscription marketplace yet is a customer loyalty bonus. The idea of this would be to award subscribers for their business, and not leave them in the above stated situation. I believe this would also greatly improve customer retention, as well as sales conversions. Let’s say for every 3 months that a subscriber pays their fee, they can choose one premium theme from the set of offered themes to be marked as “purchased” the same way a single theme license is done. This means the customer would have a permanent license to a theme of their choice for every 3 months that they continued using the subscription service.

Given this setup, I would be much more likely to use a theme subscription service, and I would use it for much longer, probably. The customer loyalty program would resolve the main drawbacks I have to using theme subscription marketplaces.

Popular Services That Limit Access to Only Smartphones

Recently, I got acquainted with the new social network “Circle” via the Google Play store on my Android smartphone. I’m not really going to go into detail about Circle, because that is off topic of this post, suffice it to say, I wasn’t impressed, at all.

At any rate, I thought perhaps my experience would be better on a computer, instead of my smartphone, so I went and looked up Circle in Google and visited their website with the intention of logging into my account and giving it another go. What I discovered is that Circle does not have any functionality to be accessed on a traditional computer, or even on a Chromebook. It’s exclusively available on smartphones.

Consider that for a moment, a social network that is only accessible from your handset. This sparked some interesting thoughts for me, because as far as I’m concerned, if I were to set out to build a social network, I’d definitely want to have an app for smartphones, however, I would begin my development process on a website. At first, I thought the reasons for this new approach could be related to business expenses, but perhaps, there is another “sleeping giant” of a reason, which I’ll get to shortly. I simply do not understand the mantra of limiting accessibility of a service you are trying to launch with the hopes of it going viral (and I’m sure the true dream of Circle’s creator(s) is to replace Facebook and Twitter as the top social networks), however, the creator(s) of Circle, thinking outside the box, have given me some food for thought.

The next thing to consider is that Circle is having some pretty good success, even with it’s limitations, so I believe this will lead to other companies mirroring this approach of not running a traditional website alongside their app.

Also, another term that’s been gaining a tremendous amount of steam as of late is SMM, or social media marketing. Now look at these two developments together, and you begin to understand why I mentioned a “sleeping giant” earlier in this post.

A few years back, as smartphones really took off and almost everyone found themselves holding an Android or iPhone device in their hand, advertising and marketing via apps exploded, and the internet marketing industry expanded to an entirely new market.

I believe that is the hope, and intention of Circle, and other apps with this same approach. As you’ll notice, just like the early Facebook, Circle is free of ads. The question isn’t if, but when, Circle will open a PPC advertising service, and when it does, it will be the first of it’s kind – a social network offering advertisements exclusively to Android / iPhone handsets, and the best part: to use Circle, it has to be able to identify your location! For the obvious reasons, there will be a slew of folks lining up to pay for this advertising, simply because it will be a huge untapped market for a few months, and there will definitely be a huge amount of money to be made, and leads to be generated. Also, since the advertising service hasn’t been released yet, who knows what nice tricks Circle has up it’s sleeves to make this advertising service stand apart from it’s competitors, and when the advertising revenue comes pouring in, you’ll start hearing about Circle more and more.

As with any for-profit business, the service is a means to an end: getting paid. Circle intends to get paid, and in a major way, so please understand that the entire concept, and the way they are building their service is for advertisers first, and users second. Some will disagree, but at the end of the day, if no one is advertising, Circle isn’t making money, and they will eventually run out of venture capital, and go under. I don’t see Circle going under anytime soon, as long as they make it to the launch of their PPC service, because marketing via smartphones to users who each have verified location each time they open the app opens yet another new advertising approach to local advertising! Even if you’re traveling, say from Atlanta, GA to Seattle, WA, when you land in Seattle and log into Circle, Seattle businesses will have advertisements just waiting for you to login. Yep, that’s right, local advertising based on the users current location. Did you see that one coming the first time you logged into Circle?

Another very popular social network that is, for all intensive purposes, riding the fence in these aspects is Instagram. While you can access your account on a traditional computer, you need a smartphone to register an account. You cannot register an Instagram account from your desktop, laptop, or even the browser based app driven Chromebook.

If you regularly pay for advertising on Facebook, Twitter, or other PPC platforms, keep your eyes peeled for the launch of Circle’s advertising platform, it’s sure to be a huge gold rush.

The Downfalls of Relying on Organic SEO for Google Traffic

While relying on Google for traffic is fine for some businesses, it’s definitely not fine for all businesses.

The reason? There are only 10 spots on page 1, and only a few of those are above the fold. Then consider that Google ads take up prime real estate at the top for many searches, displayed above even the first organic result! I don’t know about you, but if I had done what it takes to reach the #1 spot in Google SERPs for a given search, only to be topped by an advertiser paying Google AdWords for traffic, I’d be pretty peeved, especially depending on the investments I had made to obtain that position. Consider further, that if you’re a business, local business results will take up more prime real estate, pushing the normal SERPs even further down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that being listed high on the first page of SERPs in Google is a bad thing, it certainly is not. What I am saying, is that for your business, it may not be the most feasible approach as a means to an end of getting a lot of traffic.

Bounce back to the point I made above regarding Google AdWords. While your particular search keywords will determine the price range that a click will cost you, if you’re interested in short term traffic results, AdWords may be a good solution for you. The reason is that you are paying for a targeted visitor, and if traffic isn’t targeted, well, it shouldn’t even count in most cases, as the conversion rate of that untargeted traffic into taking the desired action on your website is going to be abysmal. Past Google AdWords, there are a lot of alternatives to paying for targeted traffic out there, and these should be considered as well. I’m not saying to give up on organic SEO, but if you’re launching a business, you don’t have time to rank in Google in most situations. You need results, you need customers and customer engagement, you need traffic, and you need it yesterday!

For some keyword searches, it may not even be feasible to shoot for #1 in Google. Take a look at your competition and decide for yourself. If #1 in Google is a long shot, near impossible, or possible, but only at some point in the distant further, don’t be naive or give up, simply look at your alternatives. Spinning your wheels wishing on a star isn’t going to change your SERP spot or your traffic generation. 

Also, social media has created a great way to generate traffic. While you can also run paid advertisements on social networks, you can also market the old fashion way, as well as the new school way and way of the future. What I’m talking about is direct customer engagement. If you’re a small business, nothing is stopping you from seeking out potential customers on social networks and connecting with them. While you have to conduct this networking in a legitimate fashion, as you don’t want to spam people or come off as such, some thought needs to be given to how you will approach these potential clientele.

The bottom line is this: if you run a business website, you need traffic to that website for it to turn into conversions, even if that conversion is your phone ringing, an eMail popping up in your inbox, or an order being placed and paid for via your shopping cart. To get traffic, you will have to spend time and money, it’s up to you how much time and how much money you spend, but that’s really all there is to it. Competition online for traffic is so fierce currently, that the days of doing some great SEO to your website and watching the traffic pour in are all but over. Chances are, your market, your niche keyword term, is saturated, which means even if the competition isn’t very stiff, it’s still competition nonetheless, and you have to outrank them. Not only that, you need to consider Google algorithm updates and whether any practices you employ can be construed as unethical, in which case, your website might be due for a whop from the Google hammer, knocking you way down the SERP list, banning you from SERPs for the keyword you are targeting so adamantly, or in extreme cases, deindexing your website altogether. Staying in the #1 spot isn’t going to be an easy thing, and it’s only going to become more difficult as time goes on and Google continues to evolve it’s search algorithms.

The best solution I have found to generate traffic is to diversify and be transparent. Focus on your brand, focus on traffic goals, and try to keep all of your efforts in line with bringing in targeted traffic. One big marketing move that brings in a lot of untargeted traffic is not going to yield the results you’re looking for, and deals you a major blow: your metrics will be totally skewed to the point that your targeted traffic will be lost in the mix, and you may not be able to gauge the results accurately for other traffic sources.

This brings me to my next point, which is all about metrics. While doing some marketing campaigns may yield the results you’re looking for as far as revenue is concerned, tracking the results is key, it’s priceless, without it, you’re taking shots in the dark. You need to know which marketing campaigns brought you traffic, and how much traffic it brought, and how that traffic converted. Without metrics, you could easily miss a great opportunity to scale up in the case that you run a small marketing campaign which only resulted in a few conversions. However, it may be the case that this small campaign had a much higher conversion rate than other campaigns you’re running on a regular basis. The numbers aren’t everything, and they’re kind of like Tony Montana, they always tell the truth, even when they lie. The beauty of metrics is that it gives us the opportunity to gain insights into these statistics in a way that isn’t nearly as easy to do with a physical business, so you would be infinitely wise to take advantage of them as much as possible.

In short, diversify, spend the required time or money, track the marketing campaigns, and adjust your approach based on the metrics.