Over the past few weeks the number of emails I have been getting from my affiliate networks of choice has increased. With the holiday season fast approaching, a number of vendors are stepping up their campaigns so that they can get as much of the money that will be spent by online consumers in the next few weeks.

As part of this drive, a number of them are coming up with all sorts of offerings to entice people to spend their money with them. These offerings may include percentage off discounts, free shipping, daily deals, a dollar amount discount after a certain amount spent and so on and so forth. In order to take advantage of a number of these promotions, consumers will probably need to use or apply a coupon code.

How Marketers Lose Out on Coupon Commissions

For affiliate marketers, the task of promoting an advertiser offering with a coupon code may seem as easy as placing the code up on a page. Doing this could lead to a loss in revenue if a site visitor can simply copy and paste the coupon code. This is how:

• visitor lands on your site via Google search etc.
• visitor highlights and copies coupon of interest
• visitor opens a new tab in their browser and goes to the advertiser site without clicking on an affiliate link on your site
• visitor completes a transaction on advertiser site using a coupon code that they found on your site

As you can see, if they use the coupon code in this manner, you will have lost out on a commission. Depending on how good you are at driving traffic to your site, this could mean a loss of 2,3,7…16…. who knows commissions a day. Depending on what the item is and how much the vendor pays out, you could be losing out on a substantial amount of money.

How Coupon Code Plugin Increases Click Through Rate

A way off getting around this problem is to have a system in place where visitors have to take an action such as them clicking on your affiliate link in order to copy the coupon code. Coupon Code Plugin for WordPress allows you to do just that by letting you add stylised coupon codes to posts and/or pages that visitors cannot just highlight and copy.

It comes with a range of various button options (as well as custom options) with which to display your coupons. Other features include being able to mask affiliate links, opening of the target site in a new window, a custom call to action and various button icon options such as an arrow, scissors or a + sign (just to name a few).

The stylised button also acts to draw the attention of visitors and this with an effective call to action will lead to an increase in click though rate because you are making life easy for them. With the coupon code button also taking them to the target site you the affiliate should realise an increase in commissions.

The holiday season bring with it November. November brings with it “Black Friday”, the most profitable day of the year for online sales. The following Monday, “Cyber Monday” is also a very lucrative day for online retailers. There will be all sorts of coupons on all sorts of deals that consumers want to take advantage off. All that you as an affiliate marketer needs to do is position yourself for maximum profitability. Consumers spend BILLIONS of dollars a year via coupons and if you are an affiliate marketer who is serious and wants as share of the pie, there is no better way to do this than with the use of Coupon Code Plugin.

Last month, I came across Steve Stoute being interviewed by Piers on Piers Morgan Tonight that touched on some of his successes in life, his new book; The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy and how he would brand Obama. That short interview was insightful and I just came across this short video that might provide a bit of food for thought for marketers. In it he talks about building a brand and what brands need to do in order to connect with consumers the right way. He has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world and helped position them for success. What he has to say goes to show how marketing campaigns can easily get lost in translation.

The Holiday Season is fast approaching and with it comes the period when consumers let lose of their hard earned cash and send it in the direction of online and offline retailers. For affiliate marketers, this brings along a time when you can earn a lot more money compared to other periods of the year.

The other day I was reading through Search Engine Watch and came across an article, 3 Steps to Happy Holidays SEM Returns. One of the things that stuck out the most was the Retail Demand Curve For Holidays (2007-2010).

As you can see from the graph, there is a steady increase in impressions, clicks and revenue throughout October. As it moves into November, there is a marked increased and as it heads towards the tail end of the month, revenue shots up over 200%. According to ComScore, 2010 online retail sales for the 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion. This was a 12% increase on the previous year and some analysts are predicting that retails sales will increase by 12-14% this year. Whether or not it does increase, $32.6 billion is a lot of money that affiliate marketers can get a share of. Keep in mind that these figures as only for the U.S.

Some things that come to mind to get you thinking more about working on the holiday season include:

Marketing Plan – Put together a plan that covers the next 2-3 months and make sure that all of the important dates are on it. Upcoming dates of importance include Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and of course Christmas, just to name a few. You need to know what you are going to promote, how you are going to promote and when you are going to promote.

Pages – If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to get pages ready. Besides the usual to-do’s of content and keywords, one big thing that comes to mind is mobile optimised landing pages. More and more people are accessing the internet via mobile devices and if your pages aren’t mobile optimised, you could miss out on commissions.

Email Lists – If you have an email list, get holiday emails ready now so that you aren’t rushed to do so when the time comes to send them. VerticalResponse is good email marketing service that comes with a wealth of free resources to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Testing – A/B testing of different variations of your pages and email templates is a good idea as this will allow you to determine which one will produce the best results.

This is not a definitive list of things you can do to work on maximising affiliate commissions during the Holiday Season. The purpose of this post is to get you thinking more about what you need (if you haven’t already done so) to do to work towards a profitable season.

Search engine optimisation is something that just about every webmaster has thought about and maybe even tried to master. There are so many resources out there where you can learn about the subject or get someone to do it for you. Some are good and others may put you into a situation that is counter productive to your SEO efforts and cost you more than just a lot of money. The way I see it, before you decide to get into anything or pay someone to do it for you, it pays to be knowledgeable on the subject matter yourself.

Late last year I was fortunate enough to receive a complementary copy of Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing from Kris Jones. I am not a fan of reading books but I was pleasantly surprised when I flipped through it for the first time and saw the visual format of the book, which made reading and learning a lot easier. This is one of the best resources I have come across if you want to learn SEO and the book follows a step-by-step fashion and covers the following topics:

1. Getting started with search engine optimisation
2. Keyword generation
3. Creating pages
4. Basic web site structure
5. Advanced web site structuring
6. Creating content
7. Creating communities
8. Building links
9. Using Google analytics
10. Social media optimisation
11. Creating pay-per-click campaigns
12. Optimising PPC campaigns through quality score optimisation
13. Optimising for other search engines
14. Monetizing traffic
15. Installing SEO plugins

As you work through each of the topics, Kris outlines what it is, why it is important, how to do it and what not to do to jeopardise your SEO efforts. For example, in the Creating Content chapter he talks about how content is the “lifeblood” of a site how quality content is directly proportional to ranking well in search engines and customers making purchases on your site. He also covered using proper keyword density, latent semantic content and avoiding duplicate content. Latent semantic indexing was something I didn’t know about but after reading about, saw as something that is very relevant in SEO and best of all, easy to implement.

As I was working through the book, I took one of my sites and made a few changes to it. Over the last few months I have noticed and increase in organic traffic and this I attribute to the book. The increase in traffic has correlated to an increase in revenue. A bonus about Kris being the author is that he is more than willing to answer questions or clarify anything discussed in the book. I had a couple of questions and to get mine answered by going over to his blog, asking the question on the relevant post and a little while later I had a response.

All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who really wants to get a handle on search engine optimisation. The $20 investment is well worth it and will go a long way in getting your website to rank well about the rest.

Click here to purchase Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing

A few hours ago MaxBounty sent out an email announcing announcing a $1000 affiliate referral contest. At the same time they also mentioned how they hoped I had already taken a look at their new site. Truth be told, I have not been over to MaxBounty in a bit of while but I like their new interface. The site looks much better than it used to and navigating around it is a lot easier.

In a nutshell, MaxBounty is a CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising affiliate network that has more than 10,000 active publishers. With more than 500 advertisers within their network you are spoilt for choice as to what campaigns to promote. Publisher payments are made on a monthly basis via cheque, PayPal or electronic transfer.

They are a network that is worth taking a look at and to help push their new interface, they are running a $1,000 affiliate referral contest:

• $650 for generating the most referral income

• $250 for generating the most approved referrals

• $100 randomly selected from all participating

Sign up to MaxBounty and be in the running to win a $1,000 bonus.

As an affiliate marketer one thing that happens as time goes by is that you sign up to a number of programs which presents the issue of how to keep track of and organise all of your affiliate links. I was over at FresheVenture.com and came across a video that Keller put together that provides a very simple solution on how to organise your affiliate links. If you have been struggling to organise or keep track of all your links, this video is worth a watch:

I am looking at starting up a newsletter for one of my sites which means going out and doing a bit of research to see who would provide me with the best solution for my needs. There are a number of email marketing solutions out there to choose from and they include AWeber, Constant Contact and VerticalResponse just to name a few. For some reason though, AWeber seems to be the one of choice for most of the bloggers whose newsletters I am signed up to.

Anyway, whilst looking around for a suitable provider I came across this webinar by VerticalResponse that I thought some of you may find interesting and useful especially if you are thinking about getting into email marketing.

I haven’t decided on who I am going to use yet but the nice thing about the ones mentioned in this post is that they all offer free trials so I might give all of them a try to see who will work best for me.

I hope you enjoy the webinar.

ZaaBiz, an Australian networking platform for professionals where people can interact on a business level is offering its members the chance to monetize their Tweets. Not only do get the chance to engage with like minded professionals where you can open yourself to a whole new world of opportunity, you can also earn money on new members you refer.

How it all works is simple:

For every unique member from Australia or New Zealand that registers on ZaaBiz via your recommendation will earn you AUD0.50. All that they need to do is sign up and mention your twitter ID in the space provided in the registration form.

This seems like a pretty good deal and besides the fact that you could earn yourself a bit of pocket change joining ZaaBiz could work in your advantage simple because of the fact that you will be NETWORKING! Networking opens you up to opportunities that could boost your career to levels that you might have once thought unimaginable. Are you convinced?

Follow me on Twitter @gerri50

Terms

• Enter the code CBReferral – Gerri in the comments section of your Clickbooth application.
• Meet the $1000 minimum tier to be guaranteed a prize.
• Winners may swap their prizes for a PayPal payment of equal value before the prize is sent.
• Current Clickbooth publisher will receive appropriate prize level award for first month and then 2% of lifetime earnings for referred pubs every month after that.- For international publishers (residing outside of the US), in the event that we cannot find a company that ships your prize internationally to your country, Clickbooth will compensate by sending a PayPal payment or bank wire payment (depending on the prize value) for the value of the prize.
• Any publisher caught doing illegal measures such as fraud or being in violation of the affiliate network’s Terms of Service will not be eligible for a prize.

So go on, get going, sign up to Clickbooth, make yourself some money and win something whilst you are at it.

Here is a video by Darren Rowse talking about Google’s PageRank. I won’t spoil it by saying a lot. It is worth a watch.

The relevance of your advertiser’s ads in relation to your site content can play a big part in your commission earnings. It is important to place ads, text links, or product links that are relevant to your site/blog’s content. Contextual banners, buttons, embedded text links etc. related to your site/blog’s content are more likely to be noticed by readers.

Items out of context are most likely to be ignored. These ads end up taking up space that you could use and in some cases puts off readers who really don’t want to see irrelevant ads plastered all over the page.

In the case of text links a good thing to do is that every time you mention the name of an advertiser within your articles, add it in as a text link.

There is a lot more to learn when it comes to affiliate marketing and I’m still very much in the process of learning. For some really good information on affiliate marketing it would pay to invest in Quit Your Day Job by Jeremy Palmer (Click Here!) which is a very good resource on affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing? It’s basically you advertising products and/or services and getting paid a commission on any sales or leads eventuating from your visitors. Commission rates vary and are set by the publisher of the product and/or service you have chosen to advertise.

If you do a search for Affiliate Networks/Programs you’ll find that there are so many out there to choose from; some are free to join and others charge a small fee.

As with most things online it always pays to do a bit of research. There might be people out there who are trying to scam you or you may sign up to a particular network that does not suit your needs.

As a start, you could take a look at the bigger players such as Commission Junction, Clickbank and Linkshare – Click here for free LinkShare Membership. These three networks all have a lot of programs to offer that will suit a wide variety of websites/blogs.

Signing up is quick and easy. Once that is done the next step is applying to be an affiliate for a particular merchant and when approved you are all set to go. You are provided with an HTML code that you just have to copy and paste onto your website/blog.

Commissions are paid out differently and you can get this information from each networks website. From what I have seen so far they are usually paid out via cheque or an electronic payment into your bank account or PayPal.

If you haven’t already taken a look at this or tried it out, why not go ahead and do so!

As I stated in my last post, I am looking for ways of increasing traffic to my blog. I came across an article that some of you people out there might find interesting and helpful. Enjoy!

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
By Denise Wakeman

You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines:

http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman

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