Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Affiliate Marketing 101 For Affiliates and Product Owners
Interviewing Darren Rowse Of Problogger
Sarah East From PopCrunch – *NSFW* – Most Awkward Interview Ever
No better time than to give thanks!
To sell or NOT to sell???

Affiliate Marketing 101 For Affiliates and Product Owners

Posted: 01 May 2015 08:41 AM PDT

I have been meaning to write a general guide to Affiliate Marketing but with some real life examples from my experiences for about hmm 4 years now. This is by no means a holy grail but I wanted to put something out.

When I started in making money on the internet it was through Google AdSense. But it didn’t last long because I learned very quickly that all the advertisers through AdSense were Affiliate Marketers. So I followed the money and signed up to these affiliates and that started my world of selling other people’s products as an affiliate.

The Affiliate Marketing world is composed of 2 core components and I have been on both sides of the coin:

The Publisher – Commonly referred to in the industry as the Affiliate or affiliate marketer. You have a lot of creative control to sell other people’s products. And if you find the right way to present them and their perceived value than there are riches to be had. I don’t have access to full statistics back when I was an affiliate but I remember my record day was about $15,000 in profit. But Keep in mind that you take on all the risk here. You could spend countless hours/days and a lot of money and yield nothing. On several occasions in testing something new I have lost thousands of dollars in only a few hours. Most of the time you can expect to lose money until you profit. In the end you are just a commission only based sales person on the internet.
The Advertiser – Commonly referred to in the industry as the offer or the product owner. This is the company that sets up the affiliate program in house or with a network. As the product owner you are in essence the business owner. Financially you have little downside. You know what your margins are and what you can pay a commission based sales person (an affiliate). If you are not doing it in house then a network will work directly with affiliates to get them to promote it. This is a double edge sword. The hardest thing is just that because affiliates have all the risk to sell your products its very hard to recruit them. You went to an affiliate network because they have affiliates in the industry your product exists. However most your competition is already making money for all involved so the barrier to entry as the product owner is VERY VERY VERY hard. You have a very low chance that anyone will even try your offer.

If you have ever attended shows like the Affiliate Summit or LeadsCon you will see 90% of it is people looking for affiliates. They all make claims of highest converting offers and best payouts.

Its a very high stakes and high swinging industry. The ups and downs are crazy.

On the publisher side when we took the ShoeMoney System to an affiliate network it took over 6 months to do anything. We went from making next to zero sales per day to over a thousand. It was insane. When your product/offer is hot then every affiliate will want it and every affiliate network will want to run it. When its not than its frustrating as hell. Either way most don’t last long. We only lasted about 3 months until we lost our credit card processing. We went from processing $0 per day to over $250,000 per day…. and only had a 3 million dollar cap on our merchant account. We had to pause the campaign and get more merchanting and once we did we couldn’t get anyone to try it again and the few that would try it said they were making more with some other make money online product. O well was awesome while it lasted.

But you need to start somewhere no matter what side your on.

Keys to success:

On the Affiliate side creativity is everything. You have to present the product, and more importantly the products perception BETTER than the company is/can do. Sure you can just send traffic to their landing page but if you make your own page that is where the magic happens.

On the Product Owners side – you have to do whatever it takes to get started. It might mean you have to pre-pay 1-10k (depending on quality) to get them to do a “test”. You might have to do a loss leader to get some traction. By loss leader I mean you pay out more than you make. For instance with our product that sold for $97/$79 we paid out as much as $130. We lost about $50 overtime we made a sale. But on the back end we put other monetization strategies in place to ensure we came out profitable to the tune of an average of $65 per buyer after the dust settled.

I will leave you with this. In my 10 years of experience in internet marketing the biggest keys to success are knowing your analytics and having creativity.

No matter what side you are on you HAVE to log every little component of data you can.

On the affiliate side you need to be constantly testing and measuring user behavior. What web browsers convert the best. Desktop or mobile. Geographic. Landing page optimization and testing. Tons of stuff here to make a huge difference.

On the publisher side analytics is the key to raking in money vs losing your ass. First you have to determine the LTV (life time value) of a customer. If your product is a subscription than this will take a little bit. Then back track it all to the source. Not only the affiliate network but what affiliate is making or losing you money. As a product owner I had this really drilled down that I knew not only the profit of every individual affiliate but also the refund/chargeback rate and lifetime value.

Affiliate marketing is an amazing industry that is rapidly being regulated and evolving. The most prosperous days were in the 2004-2008 era. However there is still a HUGE opportunity for both affiliates and product owners. But it will not last. The gold rush has always been regarded as the standard in a time when people could make an enormous amount of money. This is bigger.

Good luck.

Interviewing Darren Rowse Of Problogger

Posted: 08 Jan 2015 07:20 AM PST

Sarah East From PopCrunch – *NSFW* – Most Awkward Interview Ever

Posted: 08 Jan 2015 06:46 AM PST

This at BlogWorld and I had no idea who Sarah East was or Popcrunch. I would come to find out… and watch out there is some explicit launguage and very awkward moments!

No better time than to give thanks!

Posted: 27 Nov 2014 09:59 AM PST

I love the simple tradition of Thanksgiving — giving thanks. We can give thanks any day of the year, but as crazy as life is, it's good that we have the one day a year to actively think about what we are lucky to have.

First off, I'm thankful to live in this country. No country is perfect, but the U.S. is pretty great. Among many blessings, we're lucky not to experience war on our land. Again, you can turn on the news any day of the year and feel thankful that we are not experiencing some of the terror other countries are.

As far as my life goes, I'm most thankful for my family. I have an amazing wife who is strong and can keep up with me all while being a great mother. When my life was looking down more than a decade ago, J motivated me to get up and go. Since my marriage and having two beautiful daughters, life has continued to look up. I'm thankful for my two kiddos. Any parent understands — it's crazy how fast they grow up and smart they are!

I'm also thankful for my fans. You guys have also kept me up and going and motivated for the next thing. It's so cool to have a relationship with a wide base of people. It's so much fun sharing things with each other — what's working in the internet marketing field and what's not. Who's successful and who's not and why.

I wouldn't have fans without my success, which I am extremely thankful for. It's taken a lot of hard work to get to where I am. And the hard work never ends. (I'm glad that I have that work ethic in me. I'm always ready for the next thing.) But I'm really thankful for the opportunities I've been given to be able to get to this point. Sure, there's been mistakes along the way. But those mistakes have taught me lots of lessons, so I guess I'm thankful for them, too!

I'm thankful for being able to publish my book and that people are reading and buying it. I'm thankful for publicity of my website and of me as a successful entrepreneur. I'm thankful to be at it again with the ShoeMoney Show after a 5-year hiatus. And I'm thankful to be doing all of this work during the time era that public-use internet basically started. It's been a cool journey growing with the changing field.

To sell or NOT to sell???

Posted: 26 Nov 2014 10:00 AM PST

Black Friday has been creeping into Thursday, Thanksgiving day, for a few years now.

Each year, business owners must make this moral decision: Keep closed on Thursday and preserve the stay-at-home, forget-about-work traditions of the American holiday OR open on Thursday and make more sales but also subject employees to working the holiday and ignore traditions.

If you're an online business, you don't have as much of a moral dilemma. You don't have unhappy employees standing at a cash register, thinking about turkey and family and hating every person that comes through the line. But if you advertise Black Friday sales happening on your website on Thursday, you'll still have to put in some labor on Thanksgiving day.

Either way, you should obviously capitalize on Black Friday sales. That's a no-brainer. By now, you should have figured out your Black Friday sales and emailed your customers the deals. Here's an idea: Give your email list customers a special coupon that the general public doesn't have access to.

Black Friday is THE shopping day of the year. Don't be shy. Whore out your business, your sales, the day. Customers EXPECT and are actively LOOKING for great deals on this day. They plan on it. It's your duty to take advantage of that. (Some businesses decide to do only small sales on Black Friday and advertise them as if they are some amazing deal. But you'll probably get more shoppers and buyers from actually amazing deals.)

Don't forget about CYBER MONDAY. ESPECIALLY if you are exclusively an online business. This, also is a no-brainer. People who want to avoid the crowds on Friday take advantage of Cyber Monday instead. Take advantage of this, too. Get creative. Offer sales on both Friday and Monday, or for 4 or 5 days in a row. Think of ideas like a countdown sale. Start with 20% off of everything and get down to 60% off of everything while items are available.

Use and abuse Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Shoppers expect it. They don't all expect sales on Thanksgiving day. That's your call.

ProBlogger: Five Essential Steps to Removing a Google Manual Penalty

Five Essential Steps to Removing a Google Manual Penalty

Posted: 07 May 2015 07:25 AM PDT

This is a guest contribution from Nick Chowdrey.

Google takes webspam very seriously. The search giant currently sends over 400,000 messages a month to webmasters, warning them that their site performance could be at risk due to a manual Google penalty.

But what exactly are these manual penalties, and what can you do should you receive one of these notifications?

Number of manual penalties issued per month. Via Google.com.

Google's webspam team is split into two divisions: algorithmic and manual. The algorithmic team focus on improving Google's automatic algorithm modifiers, such as Panda, which deals with spammy content and Penguin, which deals with artificial backlinks.

The manual team consists of Google analysts over multiple countries who sift through domains looking for blackhat SEO practices – specifically, buying links that pass PageRank and participating in link building schemes, including excessive link exchanges between sites, and the use of automatic link building software.

If the team finds that your domain is in breach of Google's webmaster guidelines, you may receive one of two penalties – either a partial manual penalty that affects the ranking of only certain pages on your site, or a full manual penalty, that affects the rank of your entire site.

You might be notified of a manual penalty through your Google webmaster tools. The message will look something like this:

Be careful, because this process is manual, you won't necessarily get a notification. Thankfully, there are some free tools that you can use to check your SEO visibility, which can help you work it out for yourself.

So, what can you do should you receive this notification?

Here's a five step guide to removing a manual penalty.

1. Link discovery

The first step in legitimising your links is to get a full picture of all the links that currently point to your domain. From this you can determine which links are good and bad, and take steps to removing the bad ones.

Google want to see that you've put in as much effort as possible to legitimize your link profile. If you don't identify as many bad links as possible then everything you subsequently do to remove the penalty will be jeopardised.

There are many tools to choose from for discovering links. You can use Google's own Webmaster tools, or third party tools like Majestic SEO or Cognitive SEO. It's important to use more than one tool, as no single service is able to provide a complete backlink profile at this time.

2. Link classification

This is the process of assessing links to see if they're either natural, suspicious or unnatural. All natural links can be kept, unnatural ones deleted and suspicious ones changed to no-follow links, so that they don't pass PageRank.

This process must be done manually, but you can use link classification tools to automatically grade your links. This being said, Google will expect you to do a thorough job, so assessing each link manually is recommended.

You should keep the following in mind when classifying your links:

Links from spammy directories are almost always unnatural
Links from article farms that exist for link building purposes are usually unnatural
Consider removing links from sites that are irrelevant to your business sector
Links created in blog-rolls or footers are suspicious and should assessed
Exact-match links – e.g. where the link text is your company name – are also suspicious
Ensure any links acquired through paid means are 'no-follow'

3. Manual link amendment

The next step is to get those bad links removed and your suspicious links changed to 'no-follow'. The only way to do this is through a process of manual outreach – that means getting in touch with all the webmasters where you have unnatural or suspicious links and getting them to change or remove them for you.

It's important to keep a record of every site that you've contacted, including which part of the outreach process you've reached. This is because webmasters from certain sites that have been known for hosting bad links may be overwhelmed with demands, so you may need to contact them several times.

Also make sure that any changes you've requested actually take place – don't just take the webmaster's word for it.

4. Submitting a disavow request

You might not be able to change or remove some links, for various reasons. Perhaps because you can't get in touch with the webmaster in question, or perhaps because the site is now defunct.

Luckily, you can use Google's disavow tool, which lets you mark links that you'd like Google to ignore when assessing all your site's backlinks. Simply add all the links you want disavowed to a .txt file and upload it via your webmaster tools.

You might want to consider including the whole domain rather than individual pages for sites that you know have engaged in very black hat link building tactics, as this will disavow all links from that domain.

Here's how your text file should be laid out:

#The following sites have been classed as spammy or low quality links, web directory links and article directory links.

#Links List Can be Found At the following addresss: https://drive.google.com/file/example

#Some domains have not been contacted, as there was no obvious way to reach the webmaster.

domain:<domainurl>

# website links that need to be disavowed due to websites not being indexed (sign of penalty) or are of low quality.

<pagelink>

5. Submit a reconsideration request

This is the part where you suck up to Google and beg them to reconsider their penalty. It's your opportunity to provide extra notes for when your case is reviewed.

You should include what you've done to clean up your act, highlighting the fact that you've stopped further black hat link building, and also providing any helpful supportive data to demonstrate your point.

See this video by Google's head of webspam, Matt Cutts, on how to submit a successful request.

You can submit your request via your Webmaster tools. Don't expect an immediate response – the Webspam team will have to manually check your site, which can take between 3-6 weeks. You may not be successful first time, so if at first you don't succeed, go back to step one and try again!

Nick Chowdrey is a staff and freelance writer specialising in business and technology. He is currently Technical Writer at Crunch Accounting. Follow Nick on Twitter @nickchef88.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Five Essential Steps to Removing a Google Manual Penalty

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