How To Suck At Affiliate Marketing
You know what I love about WordPress? I can change the future.
Right now, it’s Thursday. You’re reading this on Monday. (Well, maybe you’re lazy and not paying any attention to your feeds. Whatever, that’s cool. You get my point.) Right now, on Thursday, I’m in a wonderful mood. I’m casually sipping a glass of wine. I’m looking around my still fully furnished apartment and thinking, oh well. I’ll deal with the packing and moving later.
By the time you read this, it will already be later. I will be considering burning down my new apartment just to get the insurance money and move to Bali. I will subsequently be realizing that my insurance won’t have kicked in yet and burning my apartment down will bring me no financial benefit. I will likely be drinking wine anyway, but it won’t be quite so casual. Think nice thoughts for me. I think I’ll be needing them.
Anyway, the point of all this rambling is to lead into the exciting news that:
SEO School now has a public affiliate program
(Give a girl some big red header text and she goes CRAZY.)
You can now get 50% of the purchase price of this book, just by whoring it to your readers, friends, and loved ones. If you consider that Amazon gives you something like 40 cents a book, $19.50 ain’t a bad deal.
Knowing that a lot of you are new to blogging and the internet and stuff and would just like to FINALLY MAKE SOME FUCKING MONEY, I figured y’all would dig this. I also figured I could turn this self-promotional blog post into something useful even if you hate me, hate my book, and wish us all ill. Therefore, I unveil:
5 Ways to Suck at Affiliate Marketing
1. Don’t own the product.
Check out ClickBank and look for the stuff with high payouts. Write a quick review telling your readers how awesome it is when in fact you know fuck all about it and it could be porn for all you know. Make sure you don’t make actual business decisions. Say, “I don’t want to pay for it!” to save yourself money in the short term and ignore the fact that doing a shitty sales job will lose you far more than the purchase price in the long term.
2. Don’t review the product.
Look at the advertising section on your blog or website and realize that nobody’s paying you to advertise. Figure it would be a good idea to fill that space with something, and plop a few pretty affiliate banner ads in there. Don’t tell your readers about it — just plop in the ad. Whatever you do, make absolutely certain those banners link directly to the advertiser’s website, not to your review. Do not presell, just let the advertiser do all the work. Cross your fingers that you’ll make some sales.
3. Be a big fat liar.
Review the product and make ridiculous claims about how wonderful it is. Say it can do things that it can’t. Forget that most electronic products and software have return policies and assume that any sale made through your link is one that will make you some cash, regardless of whether or not the customer keeps the item. Do everything you can to ensure your readers will never trust you again.
4. Pay no attention to returns or return policies.
Make no inquiries as to the return rate of the product, or what the advertiser’s return policy is. Think your readers are too dumb to care about return policies. Think the advertiser is dumb enough to pay you even though the item is returned.
5. Ignore your ads and anchor text.
Pay no attention to Advertising 101 — ad blindness. Grab your favorite banner ad, slot it in, and never move it. Ensure your readers ignore your ad, always and forever. At the same time, don’t link to your review from within your blog. If you do get it together to link to it, use lame anchor text. Whatever you do, DON’T use anchor text that could result in search engine traffic — and therefore sales — like “SEO School Review” or “review of SEO School”. Use something like “Click here” instead.
***
(If you don’t do snark or are more literal minded than I am in your sense of humor, I’ll tell you now that the foregoing was sarcasm. Don’t totally screw it up and then tell everyone Naomi told you to do it that way.)
Anyway, onto my shameless self-promotion:
1. Our top referrer has sold 25 books since SEO School was released. If you’re not math inclined, that means they’ve made $375 from one blog post, and I have a feeling they ain’t done.
2. After nearly 200 sales, SEO School has not been returned once. Even still, the return policy is 100%. We won’t screw you.
3. If you want ads, there are ten 125×125 banners to choose from. You can choose based on what works with your site, what contrasts with your site, or you can switch them up (very highly recommended, by the way) to reduce ad blindness. (While we’re talking about this, I’ll give you a little general advertising advice. Switch up your ad placement regularly. If SEO School is at the top, then Tadoodlist, then TLA, switch them up every now and again and you’ll see higher click throughs on all of them.)
4. Payout is monthly by PayPal, and there’s no minimum. None of this “we pay you when you’ve earned $100” bullshit. (That is a sneaky way to get out of paying affiliates what they’ve rightly earned. Most affiliates never make the minimum payout and the advertiser keeps the cash. I joined Amazon in October and haven’t seen a cent.) We don’t go in for that shit here. If you sell one and make $19.50, we pay you $19.50.
5. This is the interesting part. You have today and tomorrow left to buy SEO School with the coupon code “MovingDay” (no quotes) for only $30. Then you’ll go and sell it for $39. You only have to sell like, one and a half copies to make your money back. If you can’t sell one and a half copies, you might want to rethink the whole affiliate marketing thing.
If you’d like to get in on this, go to the SEO School Affiliate Program page and get this party started.
Oh, and one more thing. UK people? I KNOW you just got paid. That’s why I left the coupon code up till the first of the month. Just for you guys, cause I’m cool like that.
Next Post: A Break From Home Business Tips and Resources
a) Great post, really educational (in the fun way) even for a non-affiliate type like me –
b) nearly 200 books in just two weeks??!! Bravo! That seems huge to me! —
c) welcome HOME! — we’ve taken up a little collection, your devoted readers have, and want to send a care package/house-warming, but SOME are still debating over the basket items… [now who wanted to include extra TP, paper towels, and Goldfish crackers?!]
Thanks for thinking of us on Thursday as well as we’re thinking of you on Monday –
I’m in awe over the 25 book sales! I sold 3, LOL. Still the most I’ve made from any affiliate program yet, so Woohoo! Thanks for letting me be one of the early affiliates! I feel special. :D
I’m still reading the book btw… I’m about halfway though - you’d think I’d have more time for things like reading now that I’m full time freelance, but whatever :P
GL with the move, too - I hate moving… I like being moved in, but the process sucks!
L. M. A. O.
Most of your points, sadly, describe most of the blogs on “teh intarwebs” today.
I want to be an SEO ninja too….
Keywords are my throwing stars!
“You have today and tomorrow left to buy SEO School with the coupon code “MovingDay” (no quotes) for only $30. Then you’ll go and sell it for $39.”
Yeah, but how will your readers feel when they find out you could have saved them $9 but you’d rather make a few extra bucks?
“If you can’t sell one and a half copies, you might want to rethink the whole affiliate marketing thing.”
Ouch! That’s awfully harsh, isn’t it? Don’t affiliate sales depend on like, traffic or something? A while back I reviewed a somewhat expensive ebook and didn’t sell any copies. Then a big blogger wrote a review that wasn’t as good and the next day said he had sold a couple hundred so far. (Granted, he was offering a huge discount, and I didn’t put up a banner, but still…)
Oh, in case this wasn’t clear, when I said “how will your readers feel,” I didn’t mean Naomi’s readers, I meant the affiliate’s readers.
@ Hunter — That’s one of the reasons we offered the discount code only until the public affiliate program came out. We figured our responsibility was to give our own readers and early adopters the chance to buy the book at a discount. Our loyalty will always lie with them, but once they had the chance to buy we had no problem removing the discount because the information is worth full price and more. Especially if one considers a) the cost of an SEO consultant or b) the time spent away from paying clients while one researched the information themselves.
Regarding the readership issue, you’re definitely right. Readership has an impact but it’s not as big a factor as people think. Trust and repeated exposure play a big part, and like you mentioned, putting up a picture or banner helps.
About the big book you reviewed, certainly in your case your blog is still relatively small. But it’s growing, and by the end of this year, you’ll probably have a few thousand readers of your own. By that time, I’ll be very surprised if you haven’t sold more than one and a half copies of whatever products you choose to be an affiliate for. Affiliate marketing is certainly more of a long tail income stream.
Hm…artist as flying tiger crouching dragon…pass those stars over Michael. :)
@ Jamie, I certainly understand offering a discounted price to the early purchasers before raising it to the regular price.
What I meant is that when I wrote my SEO School review, even if I had been an affiliate at the time, I never would have said the price was $39 and left it at that. I felt obligated to mention the discount code, because I just think that’s the right thing to do.
I’ve talked to people about this before, and I know that there are perfectly nice people out there who don’t consider it unethical to omit the discount bit when writing a review. But speaking for myself as a consumer, if I bought an ebook from an affiliate because I trusted their recommendation, and later found out that they knew a discount code that they didn’t tell me about because it meant a bigger commission to them, I’d be ticked off. That’s why I won’t do it to my readers.
Thanks for the vote of confidence in my future readership growth, though I think your projections are a bit too optimistic!
BTW, what is the price for half a copy of SEO School?
When I wrote about it, I included the discount code as an incentive to buy now before the 1st . Then I wrote a second post reminding that the discount was about to expire, and I (and Naomi) got a few extra sales out of that. Urgency sells.
I will probably write a dedicated page review of it that is much more thorough and critical. A lack of criticism isn’t perceived as very honest. To save me the time, Naomi can just tell me everything she hates about it herself, and I’ll just copy and paste that into the review. ;)
I don’t think the discount was hidden in any way. And that’s just good marketing - here, buy my book cheap and read it. Enjoy it. Welcome all readers. Have fun. People then have a chance to read and review at a discounted price.
The price rises. There is nothing unethical about this, in my mind. This is pure sales and it’s not hiding anything. The launch price strategy is very common throughout the internet.
I guess I’m taking umbrage more with the fact that the comments seem to suggest Naomi was unethical - I have never seen someone agonize so damned much about doing the right thing. She did it the right way, which is more than can be said for others.
As far as the 1.5 copies - she’s right. If that’s all anyone can do, then they need to revisit their strategies as an affiliate marketer. This is just common sense and no reflection on Naomi.
Harsh? Sure. Have you ever known Naomi to give anything else but a whallop of a kick in the pants? It’s refreshing.
Kick ‘em again, girl. They didn’t get the message.
OK, I am now officially beating a dead horse. Someone call PETA or the SPCA or something.
Just to clear up any confusion, the point of mentioning the discount in this post about the affiliate program was to let potential affiliates know that if they bought today they would still get the $9 discount. However, they should also know that the discount ends today, therefore if they plan to read the book and then write a review with their affiliate link in it they shouldn’t mention the discount code because it will have expired by the time they post their review.
We never meant to suggest that affiliates should hide a discount code or “cheat” their readers. I really do apologize if it came off that way. As an affiliate marketer it is important to recognize that your readers trust you. You have to earn that trust and never, ever abuse it. Or even appear to abuse it. Anyway, that’s (probably) the last thing I’ll say about it :)
Jamie,
You were clear. I am not a pro, but I intend to add affiliate marketing to the new site and I got it. You were just giving the last call head’s up for the discounted price. This is the most unsmarmy, clear value, pro in action sales launch I have seen lately. I’ll be signing up.
James, I guess I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t saying that anything was wrong with having a discount, or that Naomi was hiding the discount, or that Naomi was unethical.
I was just questioning whether this strategy is a good idea:
“You have today and tomorrow left to buy SEO School with the coupon code “MovingDay” (no quotes) for only $30. Then you’ll go and sell it for $39.”
My interpretation of this was “Buy it with the discount at $30, then sell it to people, and don’t tell them about the discount so they pay $39.” Jamie has now said that they didn’t mean to suggest that affiliates should hide the discount code, so we’re on the same page. Maybe he meant that affiliates would buy it at $30, and then due to the timing, they’d sell it at $39 because the discount would have expired by the time they wrote their review. I don’t know, but it doesn’t really matter–I take Jamie’s word for it.
For an affiliate to hide a discount is unethical to me, but I acknowledged that there are good people out there who don’t consider it unethical. I think it’s OK to eat meat, but some would disagree. I’ve spoken to people who have bought a product from a reseller for $80, when they could have bought it directly from the source for $35. They weren’t happy about that. And I saw people selling SEO School as an affiliate without mentioning the discount (before it expired). Like I said, I don’t think that’s right, but some people will think it’s OK. I just wouldn’t want to sell it for $39, then have the buyer ask me why someone else is saying there’s a $9 discount that I didn’t mention.
Now, regarding this:
“As far as the 1.5 copies - she’s right. If that’s all anyone can do, then they need to revisit their strategies as an affiliate marketer. This is just common sense and no reflection on Naomi.”
First of all, she didn’t say “revisit their strategies,” she said “you might want to rethink the whole affiliate marketing thing.” My interpretation of that was “if you’re not currently getting results, then you should quit.” This seemed completely out of character for her, since she always seems to support the struggling underdog. And indeed, Jamie’s follow-up response sounded very different. If I’m misunderstanding this then please correct me, but otherwise I’ll just go by how I read it.
Remember when Skellie said that no freelance blogger should accept less than $50 per post? Or when Christine O’Kelly implied that it was easy to make $3,000 from an ebook? Those were somewhat controversial posts, right? Now what if they had said that if you’re making less than $50 per post then you should rethink the whole freelancing thing, or if you made less than $3,000 for your first ebook then you should rethink the whole writing thing?
Less than 1 blog in 1,000 makes $20 a month. I don’t have any statistics on affiliate marketing, but I found making $20 a month from AdSense to be easier than selling even 1 affiliate product. Just one data point, YMMV, etc., but surely not everyone can be expected to sell 1.5 copies of SEO School. What if someone just started a blog today, and it has nothing to do with SEO?
Again, if I’m misunderstanding their intention, please let me know. Now it looks like I’m the one beating a dead horse!
@ Huntar - on the $30/$39, I agree that better words could have been chosen to convey the concept (which is a widely accepted one and nothing wrong with it at all.) Same thing for the “if you aren’t doing well in affiliate marketing” section - better wording could have been used.
Regarding coupon codes in general - there are a ton of them out there. Companies publicize them, but they certainly don’t walk around promoting them. People have to look, search and find on their own, in most cases. No wrong done here either, from my perspective.
Re Christine and Skellie - I won’t even comment on my opinions of those two posts, or I’d be doing a lot of venting. I’ll leave it at “unrealistic”.
However, I did react to both posts at the time, and my reactions were that I had experience to the contrary of the opinions they put forth. Had they said, “If you’re not earning X, get out,” I would have reacted the same way.
I think saying that opening a blog today, putting up a review and ad and closing it tomorrow if you don’t sell is a wild ride and I don’t think that’s at all what Naomi was saying. That’s really reaching for a wild example, so I won’t go there.
Affiliate marketing is a sales job like any other. If an employer hired you to sell chairs and after three months, you hadn’t sold one, you’d probably be out of a job or need to sit down with the boss and find a new way that works.
(Heh. I like debates.)
Dammit James, we’re more or less in agreement. How are we supposed to debate now?
Hm. We could switch to how Canada Day is better than the 4th of July? Plenty of tonnage there…
Naomi - I haven’t been by in a while, but it’s nice to know you’ve written a book about SEO. I spend quite a lot of time trying to explain SEO to folks, even though I myself know very little about it in the grand scheme of things, so it will be nice to have a reliable resource I can point them to. Of course, I’d like to read it too, particularly if you talk in the book like you do on your blog. (Do you? Hehe.)
Guilty as charged. Thanks for the reminder. I’ve been a subscriber here for awhile, but I think this is the first time I’ve left a comment. ;-)
Marc C.
@ Marc — We are all guilty of it from time to time I think. Those Amazon books on the left sidebar haven’t changed in a while either. Sometimes that’s the problem with blogging - there’s so many other things to be doing that things like “move my ads around” get added to the end of the list. Just ’cause we write about it doesn’t mean we aren’t doing it too :)
Well I really do suck at affiliate marketing. I just don’t get it all! Maybe my 37 year old mind is just fried! And can someone tell me what the hell anchor text is? BTW thanks, for stopping by and commenting on my blog. Hope your move goes well and you are able to keep your place beautiful!
[...] Trust and credibility are more important than a fast buck. Am I saying to never accept a paid review or use affiliate programs? Not at all. [...]
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Dorothy from grammology
remember to hug your gram
grammology.com
Nice post…
There are not many advertisers who give you knowledge how to maximize your profit.
Most of them just care to their own profit.