27 MEDIA

27 Media is a best-of-breed affiliate marketing program development agency that builds some of the only truly 100% profitable marketing campaigns available. We shoot from the hip and believe in what we do. Check out services for more information. (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

[27mediaaa-blog]

Shopping Carts - the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

We stumbled across this post the other day and had a pretty good laugh. So much of it is incredibly true - but what distinguishes a good shopping cart from an affiliate management perspective? What considerations need to be in place when factoring affiliate marketing into your overall ecommerce strategy?

Golden rule #1 - Simplicity.

Make it simple, stupid. No, we’re not calling you stupid. And no, we’re not calling your customers stupid. But people, in general, CAN be stupid. Your shopping cart process needs to be very simple and straightforward. Think of it this way - if an 80 year old woman can buy your product without a hitch, you’ve done your job properly. Let’s get granular with this.

Make your products easy to market - this means offering *gasp* one or two products per site. In the affiliate space this can be really important - you’ll get significantly higher relevant keyword density for your pages (assuming you’ve written your copy correctly) and it keeps end users from getting distracted. Yes, just about anything distracts people.

No outbound links. Ever. “But my link building!” screams your in-house self-taught “SEO Guru” - Nope, don’t care. In the affiliate space, outbound links that lead the end user away from your site/ecomm process are called “leakage”. Your first priority for your site should be ensuring people are buying, not checking out other websites. keep them engaged. 

One, just one, call to action. Depending on your product, you can use creative wording like “register” for software, “try it risk free for ‘X’ days” (where “x” is your return policy’s return guarantee) or even the basic “order now”. Don’t confuse people, and drive them to a single objective. 

Big, obvious buttons - make your purchase buttons stand out. this is where that 80 year  old lady thing comes in. Bright green or orange buttons historically convert better and usually stand out from the rest of your design. Play around, and find something that pops.

Golden Rule #2 - Technological Infrastructure

Not all shopping carts are created equal. There are a few primary considerations when developing a cart for affiliate marketing (either in-house or a subscription service).

Do your homework. Select your affiliate network BEFORE you build your cart. Why? affiliate networks, often times, have different requirements for tracking, and to build a shopping cart only to find out it’s not compatible with the network’s tracking technology - well that’s a real kick in the pants. Good affiliate networks will even point you in the right direction to a good cart provider they’ve seen work well.

Test, test, test. Test the crap out of your cart, and make sure the affiliate tracking codes are working properly. Do it every day. Multiple times a day if you can. Why? If your tracking goes dead, and affiliates are sending traffic, that means they aren’t getting paid. And you’d better believe they’re watching their numbers. Your job as a good merchant is to make sure your affiliates are getting paid for as much of their traffic as possible. Otherwise, they’ll go to a competing merchant who ensures their affiliates get paid. Affiliates have very little brand loyalty and will go to whoever pays most. It’s harsh, but true.

Did we mention test? There’s more to testing than just making sure you’re getting a positive test response. What frequency is this happening? Most affiliate networks work based on cookie/pixel tracking, which can have incredibly varied success rates - in some cases, affiliates get paid on around 70% of transactions - in others, 90%. Remember, your job is to make sure they’re getting paid all the time - so crack down on your cart provider and get those success rates up.

Test for security warnings! The general public is TERRIFIED of having their identities stolen and you need to not freak them out. Get your SSL cert installed and test everything in every browser to make sure no warnings are popping up.

Golden Rule #3 - Make Your Purchase Page Easy

Remember this post? It about sums it up. There are some other key things to note:

Please, please, please don’t make people create accounts. Only if you’re REALLY sure they have a reason to come back to your site. The less steps in your ecomm process, the better.

Don’t make people enter their address info twice (shipping address and billing address) - make an option to copy or paste the already-entered info. 

Finally, take a big step back and ask yourself if any steps in the process are unnecessary. A good shopping cart is simple, sleek and FAST.

So who would I recommend as a cart provider?

I’ve had a lot of success with Wazala. It’s simple, easy to use, plugs right in to your existing page and it’s fully social media enabled - people can even buy your products through facebook.

Check ‘em out.

***Full disclosure: yes, we'll make a buck or two if you sign up for Wazala. But actually, they're a really good cart. And hey, what kind of Affiliate Managers would we be if we DIDN'T make a buck here and there?

Also, check with your payment gateway (I'll always recommend PayPal Pro - no affiliate links here) to find a compatible list of providers. Ask questions! Hopefully this post has got you primed and in the right direction.

[27mediaaa-blog]

Landing Pages.

Ahh, Landing Pages.

The most visible aspect of the affiliate marketing industry, affiliate landing pages have seen trillions of clicks over the years. Some amazing, some bad, and some down right terrible (here's looking at you, acai berry slingers).

The landing page is easily one of the most important aspects of your entire affiliate campaign. It's your only real shot at getting the consumer to digest a significant amount of copy, and done properly, will see people through all the way to your thank you page.

In the affiliate space, it's important to have landing pages for a number of purposes:

General network traffic. This may be the page you link your banners to on the network, or landers you load up for long tail, general affiliates to link to.

Super Affiliate landers. You may want to (and i'd highly recommend it) develop landers specifically for your super affiliates. Each should have unique content and solid, proven metrics.

campaign-specific landers planning on a sale, or a new marketing campaign? have landers set up and tested well in advance for new promotions, and get your affiliate base cut over quick. 

On top of that, you should explore different formats for each - short form, long form (sales letter) and rich media pages (with video, or some sort of compelling multimedia)

Not every type of traffic needs to go to a landing page however - if you're sending out long form emails, you may have already sold the customer by the time they hit your page, for example. Here's a bit of a chart showing what traffic sources you'll want to direct where:

Now, how do you build all these pages? there's a wicked tool called Unbounce that I really, really love and will help you get on the right track. It's got all kinds of great multivariate split testing features built in to let you design and then hone your pages.

If there's one thing I need to stress through all this, it's USE UNIQUE COPY FOR EACH LANDER SERIES. You never know who you may end up giving stuff out to and the last thing you want floating around is duplicate content. People may end up directing search traffic and you don't want anyone penalized.

That said, here are some best practices for your landing page development:

use a unique, obvious color for all call to action buttons. Page in green? use orange. Page in orange? use green (those are my two fave button colors, FYI) - always design landers so that an 80 year old lady could figure them out.

speak to your audience. what are your primary customer demographics? ensure you're using language that appeals to them.

Don't keyword stuff to the point of damaging your copy. Yes, keyword density is important depending on your uses, but don't sacrifice your brand messaging!

If you're going to give out landers, have metrics behind them. Get an acceptable conversion/bounce rate, THEN give the landers to affiliates. Don't make them waste money optimizing your landers.

That's all for now. Next? optimized shopping carts and high converting offers.

[27mediaaa-blog]

Creatives, Creatives, Creatives.

You need creatives to market your product with. Print ads, a web site, a catchy jingle or a poorly made commercial that makes you want to throw your remote at the TV.

Affiliate Marketers most often use the creative you provide to market your product. Imagine your creative material as not only marketing to the consumer, but also to affiliates.  You’ve got to sell them on your brand, so they can sell your brand to consumers.

Your message should be compelling, clear, with a very concise call to action.

In the affiliate world things need to be obvious, and driven toward one goal. Big orange buttons are king.

There are a ton of different creative types that you’ll need to consider when developing an affiliate program, but here are a few of them:

HTML E-Mails

Email traffic is probably one of the fastest traffic sources you can acquire as an advertiser. If an affiliate has an e-mail base he thinks your product might appeal to, he’ll take your email creative and simply blast it out, with maybe a tweak here or there.

It’s very, very important that you have your workflow  set up properly – if your e-mail prompts users to purchase at the end, link directly to your cart. If your email is a short pitch, link to a product page. Whatever you do, don’t double up content.

I usually work with emails less than 250 words and link to a product page with bullet point notes as a rule of thumb.

Banner Ads

Banners are really important for engaging content and organic affiliates.  They can drive you some very steady traffic so I’d seriously suggest developing at least a couple of sets of banner ads.

There are really two types of ads – static and rotating (there’s flash too but I rarely use those). For static ads, I’d get an Entire google standard set run – you can find the sizes here.

For rotating ads, I’d just go with the larger sized ads. If banners are too small you’re not going to be able to pick up on the rotation properly.

More on creative’s tomorrow, including proper landing page development, and useful tools!

[27mediaaa-blog]

What Types of Traffic do Affiliate Marketers Send?

A question we're asked all the time is: what types of traffic can I expect from affiliate marketers?

The answer is: there is no real answer.

Affiliate marketers can send all kinds of traffic to your brand, but it has to be traffic that drives positive return on investment for them. Depending on how your offer is structured, what the payout is, and what the conversion rate is, you may see a ton of variation in traffic sources.

That said, there are a few primary sources that we see affiliate traffic from on a regular basis.

E-Mail

Many affiliate marketers manage very large e-mail lists that can be very, very specific to an audience.  E-mail marketers tend to drive a very large burst of sales in a day or two, which then trickle off over the next few days.

Google Adwords

There are lots of affiliate marketers who drive traffic to your brand with Google. Google adwords can be an incredibly high volume, consistent traffic source – but at the same time, it’s very expensive for affiliate marketers.  It’s very important to have a good payout in place, a great conversion rate, and metrics for affiliates to see to get this kind of traffic.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook, twitter, even plentyoffish – affiliate marketers will drive ads just about anywhere they can. The target ability of each of these platforms is fairly high, making them perfect for driving the right customer to your brand.

Organic Traffic

Many affiliates, like Amazon, manage websites with great organic ranking that are able to drive traffic directly from their own sites. These types of affiliate relationships are great and also fairly consistent. Organic affiliates are also fairly low maintenance as for them it's often just a case of listing your product and watching sales come in, rather than managing a campaign.

outside these three, there are an endlessly large number of additional sources - but for the most part, they're long-tail (lower tra

Next post? We’ll get into creatives – the tools you give affiliates to succeed.  

[27mediaaa-blog]

Is Affiliate Marketing Right for Your Business?

Perhaps.

There’s affiliate traffic out there for just about everybody, but the real question is, is it worth your time and energy to acquire?

Most affiliate programs these days are focused around one of two primary payout structures - CPL (Cost-Per-Lead) and CPS (Cost-Per-Sale). If your business usually has a long sales cycle when it comes to customer acquisition, a CPL program would probably be the way to go. CPL programs let you pay an an affiliate every time an end user fills out a lead form you create. The longer and more specific the form, the more you pay. Pretty simple.

But there are major risks involved.

CPL programs need to be heavily monitored by a qualified affiliate manager and your sales team to ensure the leads driven are a) in fact real people b) have been appropriately qualified and c) that they even remember filling out your contact form.

A very small number of affiliates can take advantage of your program by sending you incentivized traffic (we’ve all seen the ads for “complete X amount of offers and get a fantastic prize” - yes, that’s affiliate marketing) or, in even worse cases, the leads can be filled out by a robot.

This is why it’s critical to ensure you’re keeping on top of the quality of your leads, scrubbing them as necessary (declining to pay for bad leads - use sparingly), encouraging good affiliates and suspending the bad.

CPS programs, on the flip side, are usually completely risk free. An effective CPS campaign will ensure that all parties (affiliate AND merchant) are turning a profit with every sale. That means ensuring conversion rates are high enough to earn affiliates positive ROI on their marketing spend, and merchants earn enough revenue per sale to fulfill the order with plenty of margin.

That said, it’s always easiest to set up an effective CPS program with products with plenty of margin. The more commission you give away, the easier it is for an affiliate to turn a profit. And the easier the ROI, the more traffic affiliates will send your way. In many cases, would-be merchants balk at the commission they’ll give away - (20-60%) but, you need to bear in mind that every sale is profit, and the affiliate business is very much a volume over margin game.

If after digesting this you think you’re still on board, affiliate marketing may, in fact, be right for you.

[27mediaaa-blog]

What IS affiliate marketing, anyway?

What IS Affiliate Marketing?

Basically, it’s compensating a 3rd party for driving internet traffic to a brand or product. “Affiliates” can be large corporations or small one-person operations. The amounts of traffic they drive can vary dramatically.

Different affiliate marketing models include Cost-Per-Lead (CPL), Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Cost-Per-View (CPV)  and Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA).

Affiliates drive internet traffic from many different sources, including PPC (Pay-Per-Click), organic traffic, email, social media, and contextual advertising.

What does all of this mean to you?

The most important thing for any brand is this:  Affiliate Marketing is one of the easiest and most effective methods to build a revenue positive online marketing campaign.

27 Media develops campaigns primarily under the CPA model, meaning you’re only paying out commissions on actual sales. Affiliate marketers promotes other people’s products via referral and get paid a commission for their marketing efforts.

How does the process work?

Virtually any ad you click on these days plants a harmless tracking cookie on your computer. These are used to track your visits to a site, and are ultimately the foundation of how affiliate marketers are paid. At 27 Media we partner with large affiliate networks that provide the infrastructure to provide you a robust affiliate tracking platform at very low cost. After a sale is completed via an affiliate link, the network identifies the cookie and the affiliate is paid commission.

There will be much more to come, so please check back or follow us @27media on twitter!