I hope you all are enjoying the answers to the questions everyone’s submitting below. Please feel free to send me your quetions and/or let me know what you’d like me to post about.
Remember, this blog is all about answering your Affiliate Questions!
Posts Tagged ‘questions’
*your questions*
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009*question* Network Demographics
Thursday, February 26th, 2009“What networks have the best demographics for offers and will convert the best for me?”
-Brenda W.
Here’s the thing when it comes to taking demographics into consideration:
Demographics are always important when it comes to pairing the right offers with the right audience. For email affiliates or affiliates running banner ads to drive traffic, demographics aren’t an issue because you know who that user is based on their email information or the site that the banners are hosted on.
However, I know a lot of affiliate marketers who are turning to contextual pop-up networks for their traffic. And if you think about contextual networks, fundamentally, the demographics are of no relevance to the ad targeting. If software on the user’s desktop is serving the ad, it doesn’t matter who sits at the computer, that software(contextual network) will continue to send ads to whoever is using the computer. There could be a household of 4-5 people that the contextual network is sending traffic to.
So when you’re thinking demographic for contextual networks, remember that it’s not the user himself that you’re targeting, it’s keywords and URLs that you’re using to target that offer no matter who is behind the computer.
*question* Rate Increase
Monday, February 16th, 2009“How can I get better payouts?”
-Ellitot P.
Well, this is a loaded question to begin with and a topic that I can blog about for hours, as there’s a lot of “out-of-the-box” ideas that traditional marketers don’t think of. But here’s the best way to get an increased payout for an offer from your affiliate manager of an affiliate network:
Tell them that you’ve tested the offer, and that you’re only at about break-even margin on the amount of money you spend promoting the offer. Tell him that in order to run it, you’ll need $X more or %XX more in order to continue sending traffic to the offer. You can throw in that you project at that rate increase, you’ll be able to deliver them more volume. Because AM’s work for commission, bigger volumes are like music to their ears and you’re likely to get a rate increase.
This isn’t a great tactic to take every time, but in situations where I really need the rate increase, and I’m able to generate volume, this go-to discussion ALWAYS gets me the rate I’m asking for.
*question** Frequency Capping
Monday, February 9th, 2009“I’m a novice affiliate, and just starting to earn some extra income with it. I’ve noticed features on my traffic networks that I’m interested in testing out, starting with Frequency Caps. I thought I would get your opinion on them before I test. What should I expect?”
-Antonio
Frequency caps are interesting. For those of you who don’t know, a frequency cap is the amount of times a single user will see an ad in a day. So a 1/24 frequency cap means that the user will only see that ad 1 time per every 24 hours.
Depending on your targeting lists, the offer, and the payout, you can increase or decrease frequency caps to optimize your campaign and make it more successful. If a user is overloaded with a certain type of offer that they’ll eventually respond to, sometimes decreasing your frequency cap to say 1/48 can make your campaign perform better. Since the user isn’t bombarded with the ad so much, they’re more likely to respond to the ad when they do see it.
On the other side of the fence, there are offers people look for and need, and it’s OK to bombard them with an ad. If they’re looking for a job, and you’re running a Careerbuilder offer running keywords like “find a new job”, “jobs in california“, etc. then for offers like that I’d increase my frequency cap to 2/24 since the keywords are so targeted and the nature of the ad is appropriate for increased frequency caps.
Try playing around with them, but only after you put some thought into the offer itself and how users will behave and respond to those settings.
*question* Commission Junction & LinkShare
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009“I’ve been told that commision junction and linkshare are good networks and they have good offers…I’ve never had any luck with them. What do YOU think?”
-Chris G.
I’ve never been a big fan of Commission Junction (CJ) or Linkshare and I’ll tell you why.
I have many friends all over affiliate and online marketing, and I’ve never known anyone to do well off them. I’ve heard they have issues with “compliance”, payment, and poor customer service. I also believe that since these offers are retail and generally from higher-priced products (vs. a free sign up offer) that they tend to convert waaaay less than affiliate network offers. So with low converting offers, poor service, and all of the issues I’ve mentioned – coupled with the fact that I’ve been at this for years and not known anyone to get rich off CJ or Linkshare, I wouldn’t recommend them.
I’d stick with network offers, especially if you’re a novice affiliate marketer. Check out my preferred networks to the right and their offers. I know they’ll make you more money.
