Hey everyone! I hope you have had a really nice 2012 and are ready to crush it in 2013 with your affiliate marketing projects. The “New Year” brings a whole new set of circumstances and issues into peoples lives that affiliate marketers can target on their websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and on Twitter. People will be actively searching for topics related to their new years resolutions, so make sure to heavily focus on niches like self-improvement to fully capitalize. Also, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, so make sure to start posting content and creating pages about Valentine’s Day topics and products to stay ahead of the curve. So, I wanted to discuss some ways affiliate marketers can take advantage of the New Year to earn more commissions and generate more web traffic. Here is a list of ways affiliate marketers can promote better and be more effectively during the Q1 time-frame:
1. Focus on New Years Resolution Products/Services – during the new year time-frame (January 1-April), people are trying to do things like:
- Lose weight
- Quit smoking
- Find love
- Get in shape
- Save money
- Start on their taxes
- Get organized
- Reduce debt
- Travel
…and many other related types of life objectives. So make sure to heavily promote “New Years Resolution” oriented products and services on your sites because they tend to covert really well during the Q1 time period. People will be flocking to Google to search for various information, strategies, and products related to achieving their new years resolutions, so if you have created content on your websites talking about that you could get those visitors to come to your site. Likewise, you should be posting on your Facebook Page and tweeting helpful information and articles designed to help people and also save them money with great companies you are affiliating with. What a great time to email your subscribers with a helpful article about new year’s resolutions and how to attain them. Make sure to craft your post titles and content really well so you can rank under various keyword phrases related to new years resolutions and the issues associated with them. Setting up Google Alerts for certain keywords is a great way to keep yourself up to date on all the latest news and Internet content about any subject, so make sure to take advantage of that Google tool.
2. Focus on Building Your Email/Subscriber List – Make sure you are prominently displaying your newsletter sign-up, Twitter account, and Facebook Fan Page widget on your sites and blogs in order to increase the overall rate at which you gain new subscribers, fans, and followers. This is always a good idea because you can re-market to your fans, followers, and subscribers throughout the year. Also, running a sweepstakes or contest on your website is another great way to opt-in your site visitors and subscribers and capture their contact info so they can become part of your audience. If you have a decent amount of site traffic take a look at aweber.com, which collects name and email via a pop-up widget on your site. It’s a great way to maximize your site traffic and grow your email list. Aweber.com also features Facebook integration which makes for sure fast opt-ins from your site traffic.
3. Syndicate Your Content Better – Once you have written and posted a new review or blog post, make sure you are “syndicating” your content by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, and your other favorite social bookmarking sites. By submitting each page or blog post you are spreading it around for others to share or like, which allows their friends to be exposed to your content. Consider launching online press releases which will build inbound links to your site and also get you additional organic search engine rankings depending on your release title and content. This is a very cost-effective way to spread the word about your site or company. You should have a little process you go through of sharing your new content on your social networks after posting it, which helps get it more exposure and traffic back to your site.
4. Increase Your Social Networking Presence – Always make sure to add new Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Foursquare friends, Pinterest friends, and connect with people on forums and other types of sites that allow you to build friends. Make sure to use these sites’ mass friend invite features to really ramp up your connections. Spending time building your connections is always time well spent and will pay dividends in the future. Building more friends and followers is a great idea because you can interact with them later and share your content and pages with them via your status updates. You can never have too many friends, followers, and subscribers to your content. You should be focused on building all of these areas so you have more people overall to market your content to. Rapportive is an amazing tool that connects right in your gmail and allows you to invite anyone in your email box to connecting on all of their social profiles.
5. Message Your Fans and Subscribers More Effectively – Now that you have fans and subscribers to your newsletter, what are you messaging them? Make sure you are sending quality, purposeful messages that will be well-received and deliver value. This is a process that should improve over time until you are sending really professional, effective messages to your subscriber bases. Send timely types of promotions and balance your promotions with good content and articles so it will be better received and not perceived as just marketing to them. Try to enrich people’s lives with your content or articles from respected 3rd-party sources or your own wonderful content. Don’t forget to be super-friendly to your fans and followers and seek to engage them in discussions. Also, polling and surveying your fans is a great way to spur interaction on your Facebook wall and get the sharing ramped up. Try Facebook Promoted Posts, which allow more fans to see and interact with your content…they work great!
6. Build Your “Social Networking Karma” – Social networking is the most power tool there is in online marketing to get your content out there, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, so it’s imperative to take advantage of it to the fullest. Make sure you are pro-actively interacting with your friends and followers by sharing, commenting, retweeting, and liking their posts (where appropriate). By doing this you will build up a lot of good “social karma”, which increases the likelihood your connections will share, comment, like, and retweet your content, which helps it go viral and get more traffic. I usually spend a good part of my day going through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn looking for status updates I can interact with. I always notice an uptick in activity on my content when I do this regularly. This is something you have to work at to get good at interacting with other people. The more you interact with others the more they will interact with your posting which makes it go viral and increases website traffic.
7. Ask for Higher Payouts – Make sure to ask your affiliate advertisers and affiliate managers for higher commission amounts, especially if you have produced for the company in the past. Most advertisers hold back what they can payout, so there is room to go up with commission amounts. If they balk at your request tell them you will go to their competitor and I bet they change their tune quickly. Tell them you can produce more sales if you were at a higher commission rate. Some companies may reward content-based publishers more than other types of affiliates, so you if you are a blog or content site you should be able to get a higher commission rate than what is published on the affiliate network. Sometimes you can even get an advertiser to sponsor a contest or sweepstakes you are running, which can be a great way to whip up excitement on your site and social networks.
8. Make Sure to Promote Deals from Your Advertisers – Make sure you are promoting current deals and coupon codes from your advertisers because people like getting and using deals, not to mention promoting coupons and deals increases the conversion rate to sale on your click-throughs to advertisers. If people come to your site and don’t find promotion or coupons they may go elsewhere looking and someone else will get the sale. Promotions and discounts tend to increase the likelihood a visitor will make a purchase, so make sure to offer people coupons and discounts when you promote and share posts about companies. You can mention it’s a special discount and even get a “vanity” coupon code which will match the name of your site. This can increase branding and make people remember your site in the future if they think they can get special discounts through your site or social presences.
9. Learn from other Affiliate Marketers – Making friends and learning from other affiliate marketers is a great way to further your own knowledge. Don’t be afraid to share what you know with others so you can get ahead together. Don’t get sucked into “make money online” courses and systems, as they usually are worthless and just want your money. There is plenty of free information out there on the Internet to guide your online marketing efforts. Go on online forums like the Affiliate Summit forums and ask any questions you my have, there are tons of people ready to answer your questions and give tips and pointers.
10. Ask for Products to Review (Samples) – Reviewing products and services is a great way to provide valuable content for your readers and subscribers. Providing an actual product review can be very effective in selling the benefits of the company you are promoting. Also, you can ask for sponsored prizes to give away in your sweepstakes and contests. Check out Woobox.com for an inexpensive way to run sweepstakes and contests. That way you can really ramp up the excitement level on your sites or fan page. If you can’t get a prize donated, you can try a $25 gift card to kick off the sweepstakes!
11. Produce More Content – Content is everything, so make sure to write until your little fingers get sore, or outsource your content writing to get more content written and published faster. Websites tend to rank better in the free traffic results when posting frequently, so don’t be afraid to post several times a day to your site. And make sure you are syndicating and sharing all of your new posts. The more pages of original content you have on your site the more free traffic you can bring in from Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing. So make sure to post like crazy so you can build your free traffic up over time. Look at your site like a house you build bigger and bigger until it’s a mansion that gets a ton of traffic! Make sure to post about new year resolution oriented topics, issues, and problems during this time of year. Then you can go back next year and refresh those posts for the following year so they stay relevant.
These are some ways to improve your affiliate marketing efforts in the new year. Let me know if you have any questions at all about these strategies, I would love to review them with you on the phone or email. Now get to it and build out the web with a bunch of great content and share it! Good luck in your 2013 affiliate marketing goals!
